Deliberately throttle network file transfer speed (Windows Explorer)

Question

I want to transfer a large amount of data between Sydney and Perth (opposite sides of Australia), using Windows Explorer, and network drives, in a Windows Server terminal services session.

I don't want to negatively impact the bandwidth available to other users.

I can wait until close of business, but I'd like to see if there was a way I could initiate a transfer, but throttle the file transfer network speed.

Is this possible?

Solution 1

Its probably easiest to wait till close of business. In order to do this using Windows Explorer you will need to limit your underlying connection between the 2 systems which is not trivial - generally this is done at the router level (as it is not part of Windows Explorer - unlike, for example some SCP clients which have this functionality built in).

You havn't mentioned the speeds of the points, but if they are both faster then 10 megabit, and if you can find out how to do it (old hardware, playing with the negotiation speeds of one of the network card on your machine), a hack might be to force your NIC to 10 megabit which will limit this.

Stepping back though - I'd imagine the latency between Perth and Sydney is not inconsequential. You may find that, providing you move stuff 1 file at a time, the performance of your network might slow a bit but be quite tolerable due to the "stepping down" of the performance of the transfer due to the distances/latency involved. As ironic as it sounds, even better if there is a bit of packet loss between the sites [For TCP connections - which these are - Packet loss acts as a signal to slow down the transfer ]

Solution 2

I know you said you wanted to use Windows Explorer, but you should try one of the little file copy applications that can limit the bandwidth. FastCopy is a little rough, but works. I use it to transfer large amounts of data to/from a NAS (shared drive) without saturating my wireless network. https://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

Comments

[Thalys]

Does this have to be windows explorer? Cyberduck would let you set the speed of the transfer

[Steve]

It is a Windows network share that I am copying from. I'm not sure if the Windows server accepts FTP connections.