How do you throttle the bandwidth of a socket connection in C?

Question

I\'m writing a client-server app using BSD sockets. It needs to run in the background, continuously transferring data, but cannot hog the bandwidth of the network interface

Answer 1

The best way would be to use a token bucket.

Transmit only when you have enough tokens to fill a packet (1460 bytes would be a good amount), or if you are the receive side, read from the socket only when you have enough tokens; a bit of simple math will tell you how long you have to wait before you have enough tokens, so you can sleep that amount of time (be careful to calculate how many tokens you gained by how much you actually slept, since most operating systems can sleep your process for longer than you asked).

To control the size of the bursts, limit the maximum amount of tokens you can have; a good amount could be one second worth of tokens.