Traffic shaping - Bandwidth shaper / management (For Linux)

1. The problem

You have limited bandwidth, which you need to share with some others or just between different services on you PC.
So you need a tool that can shape, control and manage the bandwidth so everybody can make a responsible use of it.

2. The solution

Here is where trickle comes to help us.
trickle - a lightweight userspace bandwidth shaper, that will help use control the use of our bandwidth.

- Installing it.

For Centos and Fedora

yum install trickle

For Debian and Ubuntu

apt-get install trickle

This will actually install two binaries:
trickle which is the stand alone version
trickled which is the daemon version

- How to use it

+ Stand alone

The syntax is:
trickle [-h] [-v] [-V] [-s] [-d rate] [-u rate] [-w length] [-t time] [-l length] [-n path] command
man trickle for more details
The example is:

trickle -d 20 wget http://url.of.the.site/file.to.download

+ Daemon

The use of the daemon version is more useful specially because you will not need to enter the parameters each time you use trickle just enter.

i.e.
trickle ssh -l user ip.of.the.server
And the daemon will look on its config file to follow that policies.

All the configuration should be done in the file:
/etc/trickled.conf

Here is an example of that file:

[ssh]
Priority = 1
Time-Smoothing = 0.1
Length-Smoothing = 2
[ftp]
Priority = 8
Time-Smoothing = 5
Length-Smoothing = 20

Parameters are:

Priority: Sets the priority a session have the lowest the priority number is, the highest priority the protocol have.

Length-Smoothing: Set smoothing length to length KB. The smoothing length is a fallback of the smoothing time. If trickled cannot meet the requested smoothing time, it will instead fall back on sending length KB of data. The default value is 10 KB.

Time-Smoothing: Set smoothing time to seconds s. The smoothing time determines with what intervals trickled will try to let the application transcieve data. Smaller values will result in a more continuous (smooth) session, while larger values may produce bursts in the sending and receiving data. Smaller values (0.1 - 1 s) are ideal for interactive applications while slightly larger values (1 - 10 s) are better for applications that need bulk transfer. This parameter is customizable on a per-application basis via trickled.conf(5). The default value is 5 s.

Remember that trickle only works for TCP connections and not for UDP ones.

More info: here