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

I've had good luck with trickle. It's cool because it can throttle arbitrary user-space applications without modification. It works by preloading its own send/recv wrapper functions which do the bandwidth calculation for you.

The biggest drawback I found was that it's hard to coordinate multiple applications that you want to share finite bandwidth. "trickled" helps, but I found it complicated.

Update in 2017: it looks like trickle moved to https://github.com/mariusae/trickle