can i reserve bandwidth to certain programs?

[rahilm]

I have a relatively slow Internet connection. I get around 55 kb/s speeds. When i am updating, which usually takes an hour or mostly two hours, i cannot do anything on the internet. Firefox loads webpages slowly. Apparently, update uses all the 55 kb/s to download. So my question is can i restrict certain programs on internet usage? A kind of speed limit.. I am willing to wait 2-3 hours for the update to finish rather than waiting an hour doing nothing.

[dino99]

when you says: very slow, do you mean your provider link is bad ? or is it due to your hardware ? how are you connected ?

if your provider is not performant, try other dns like opendns and make change into /etc/hosts

if you cant have better services, well its your own time organization that can be better: i.e. maybe testing is not ideal for you, download when you have nothing else to do with your system.

[SevenMachines]

i think trickle and iprelay in the repositories do this sort of thing, there may be others in there too

[rahilm]

when you says: very slow, do you mean your provider link is bad ? or is it due to your hardware ? how are you connected ?

if your provider is not performant, try other dns like opendns and make change into /etc/hosts

if you cant have better services, well its your own time organization that can be better: i.e. maybe testing is not ideal for you, download when you have nothing else to do with your system.

i'll try to look more into this.

i think trickle and iprelay in the repositories do this sort of thing, there may be others in there too

will try. do you know how to make them work?

[SevenMachines]

will try. do you know how to make them work?

sorry, no. i used trickle a few years back looking at the manpages and documentation in /usr/share/doc/<package> (probably). don't think it was too tricky but i really cant remember. there may be some tutorial/howtos out there, i dont know

[alfplayer]

Do you know this trick: http://www.associatedcontent.com/art..._synaptic.html ?

[rahilm]

Do you know this trick: http://www.associatedcontent.com/art..._synaptic.html ?

thanks. i will definitely try it when i get my hard drive back.. and when i update again..
does this work only for apt-get?

[alfplayer]

thanks. i will definitely try it when i get my hard drive back.. and when i update again..
does this work only for apt-get?

"... is available whether you use Synaptic, the update manager, or apt-get (aptitude) through the command line interface."

[rahilm]

thnx.. it works.. it seems my question is partially solved..

[nothingspecial]

When downloading large files use wget and limit the speed

wget --limit-rate=10k http://somewebsite.org/somebigfile.ext

It`s pretty self explanitory, that will limit the download sppeed to 20 kb/s, choose what ever number you like.

If you find you need your full bandwith for something else, stop wget, then restart it later on with the -c option

wget -c --limit-rate=10k http://somewebsite.org/somebigfile.ext

There are loads of options

man wget