How to Limit Bandwidth Usage for scp Transfers
By default, scp tries to grab as much bandwidth as possible for transfers. On
an ADSL line without bandwidth shaping, this has the unintended side-effect of
fully saturating the line, in effect blocking any other connection.
Today I learned how to limit scp bandwidth. Turns out, there’s a built-in
flag:
-l limit
Limits the used bandwidth, specified in Kbit/s.
In practice this means:
scp -l 8500 server:/path/to/file .
The above example yields a download at ~1 MB/s.
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