How to throttle bandwidth on Mac OS X
Everyone living in a shared house will eventually run up against the problem of sharing broadband, especially if you’re downloading music, movies, games and system updates. I live with my girlfriend and a couple of days ago she was working from home and I really needed to download some Audible books for a long journey I had the next day, unfortunately whenever I tried to do this it kept knocking her off of her company’s VPN connection. Now, I’ve seen download managers and bittorrent clients with bandwidth restrictions but nothing that would throttle a web browser so I did a bit of Googling and found this helpful post. Basically I’d worked out that at full pelt I was getting 135Kbps and this caused a problem with the VPN connection so I figured that maybe a third of that (45Kbps) would be a fair amount of bandwith to take, to do implement the bandwidth cap I had to…
- Open up a session on OSX as the Administrator (I did this in parallel to my existing login).
- Open up Terminal.
- Type:
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 45KByte/sThis sets up the rule limiting your bandwidth.
- Type:
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80This enables the rule.
Once you’ve finished the downloading you wanted to limit you’ll need to flip back into the administrator profile and do this…
- Type:
sudo ipfw delete 1This deletes the rule.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. Please note that this only restricts Port 80 which is the general web traffic port, if you had other activity going on (Skype, Bittorrent) then you’d need to add a rule for each relevant port.
