To limit bandwidth in osx

There may come a time when you want to limit your http download bandwidth coz it’s taking up all your bandwidth. I came across two apps that try to accomplish this task but I am afraid to say they are too hard to understand. So let’s just do this in the terminal.

1. First, create a pipe/rule that allows 100KB/s sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 100KByte/s

2. Then assign that pipe to port 80 which is the remote web server’s http port #. It’s src-port coz the data is coming into your computer. sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

3. At this point, all your http download bandwidth will max out at 100KByte/s. You could then do other things like ssh’ing to your work place or whatever.

4. To clear the bandwidth limit, do the following to remove pipe 1. sudo ipfw delete 1

All these can be done on the fly. No reboot nonsense.

For more info, google for “ipfw bandwidth throttle” or do a “man ipfw”.