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up vote 4 down vote favorite

Is it possible to throttle (limit) the download speed of wget or curl ?

Is it possible to change the throttle value while it is downloading ?

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2  
No it is not possible to change the speed while downloading. Have a look at gui download managers like fatrat or multiget – Ulrich Dangel May 23 '12 at 15:48
1  
You can however suspend the process via SIGSTOP or ctrl+z and resume it later with SIGCONT or fg. This should pause the download process. – Ulrich Dangel May 23 '12 at 15:54

2 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Yes both wget and curl support limiting your download rate. Both options are directly mentioned in the man page.

curl

   --limit-rate <speed>
          Specify the maximum transfer rate you want curl to use. 
           This feature is useful  if you  have a limited pipe and 
           you'd like your transfer not to use your entire bandwidth.

          The given speed is measured in bytes/second, unless a suffix 
          is appended.  Appending  'k'  or 'K' will count the number
          as kilobytes, 'm' or M' makes it megabytes, while 'g' or 'G' 
          makes it gigabytes. Examples: 200K, 3m and 1G.

E.g: curl --limit-rate 423K

wget

   --limit-rate=amount
       Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second.  Amount may
       be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the k suffix, or 
       megabytes with the m suffix.  For example, --limit-rate=20k will limit 
       the retrieval rate to 20KB/s.  This is useful when, for
       whatever reason, you don't want Wget to consume 
       the entire available bandwidth.

E.g: wget --limit-rate=423k

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Is it possible to change it dynamically while a download is in progress ? – mataug May 23 '12 at 14:34
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@GautamK No as neither wget nor curl are interactive programs. – Ulrich Dangel May 23 '12 at 15:28
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@GautamK For one large file, if the server accepts it, you can kill the wget or curl process and resume with wget -c or curl -C. If you really need to reconfigure a running process, use trickle with a daemon — but the setup is a bit complicated. Alternatively, look into traffic shaping — again, the setup if complicated. – Gilles May 23 '12 at 23:08
up vote -1 down vote

You have to throttle the network-link that is being used for the transfer.

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How would one achieve this? – uther May 23 '12 at 20:32

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