Keeping Google Music Manager (or any program) From Eating Your Bandwidth on linux

I’ve been using Google Music Manager to upload my collection to the cloud (primarily as a free backup solution), but I’ve had one small problem.  The rate limiting options are kind of arbitrary, and don’t always match what I want.

I have pretty crappy uplink bandwidth at my home – somewhere around 0.5 Mbps (which is NOT kp/s or MB/s).  As a result, it’s pretty easy to choke my upward bandwidth by setting Google Music to “Fastest Possible”.   I can set it lower – but say when I’m at university with a 250Mbps upspeed connection (over wifi!), I don’t want to be limited to a tenth that.  What I needed was an external program to configure the speed at each runtime.

trickle is that program for *nix systems.  It’s a commandline program, but that’s okay.

I installed trickle, then use this command to run Google Music (which is set to use “fastest possible”) when I have limited bandwidth:

trickle -s -u 20 /opt/google/musicmanager/google-musicmanager

This limits the upward bandwidth to 0.2Mbps, which works well for still being able to use my internet connection.  Then the rest of the time I use the default command to take advantage of the higher internet speeds elsewhere.

This isn’t a vital thing to use with Google Music – as mentioned, the Music Manager has built-in rate limiting.  It’s not quite what I want, but it’s not bad.  But I mention it – and the syntax – because other programs don’t have that kind of limitation.  You can use trickle with just about any program when you need it.  Pretty awesome stuff.