[Nottingham] Slow copy

[James Gibbon]

"Roger Light" wrote:

> One of my work machines has an nfs mount which I'd like to copy
> onto the local disk. It's rather large though - the order of 10GB.
> Whilst I could do the copy over a weekend or so, I'd be interested
> if anyone has a method for bandwidth throttled copying so that it
> could copy and not really impact network performance. I'll admit
> it's mostly because I'm just curious as to whether it's possible,
> but that's no real sin :)
> 

It's definitely possible .. at least one version of ftp allows 
you to specify a maximum transfer rate in either direction.

At my last job, I wrote a script to do (very) crude bandwidth 
throttling which basically passed stdin to stdout in bursts.  I 
used it as a filter to pass tar ouput through, before being 
extracted at the other machine.

Compressing / uncompressing on the fly might help if your data 
is reasonably compressible (text for example).

James