The sys admin's daily grind – Trickle

Blown Away

Article from Issue 160/2014
Author(s):

If your data traffic suffers from congestion at times, don't worry. Now you can shoot down programs that are heavy on traffic to free up the inflow and outflow.

I am over 40 years old and am starting to mellow in my old age. No, I'm only joking; certain phenomena still drive me up the wall. For example, when I am using SSH on a server to edit a configuration file and the bandwidth is so pathetic that the landing zone is a matter of luck when you try to position the cursor – that really makes me mad.

I know, I know, today even a line to a Black Forest village has enough bandwidth for an SSH connection, if you have exclusive access. Because hell, as Sartre already knew, is other people: In my case, it's the HTTP connections that are pushing my poor little SSH to the edge. I could turn to Mosh [1], but that helps with shaky connections rather than crowded lines. My remedy for traffic jams goes by the name of trickle [2] [3].

This traffic-shaping tool uses LD_PRELOAD to redirect some standard library calls, such as socket() and therefore only works with dynamically linked binaries. However, that practically includes all programs that the typical user deploys to eat up bandwidth. In the simplest case, I might even be one of these users myself; then, I can practice self-restraint when calling traffic-producing programs. To this end, I can start Firefox, for example, with:

[...]

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