Monthly bandwidth limits

[kickteeth]

Most Japanese high speed home connections have high up and down bandwidth. I get regular speeds of 21mbps both up and down. The problem is that the ISPs slap your hand if you go over X amount of gigs uploaded in one billing cycle (one month)... I get in trouble with my ISP if I go over 30 gigs in one month. If it happens again, I have to go into the office and sign a "promise letter" saying that it won't happen again. If it happens again after that, they cancel the account. Sort of a 3 strikes policy.

While I have been using the up bandwidth limit option to help resolve my problem, a great enhancement for the Japanese market (and other countries where this is an issue?) would be a monthly bandwidth limit option... i.e. a setting that stops all uploading after the limit has been reached. Every first of the month, or every 30 days, the counter would be reset.

[User294]

Some ideas:
1) Sure, there is no monthly bandwidth in Transmission, BUT there are statistic, ratio limits (default and per-torrent) and rate limits (global and per torrent), so you can keep your traffic consumption fairly predictable, either by setting up seeding ratio, so torrents are automatically stopped, or if you want to keep rare files available for others, you can limit speed (per torrent or globally, depending on your goals) - this will allow others to do more job on exchanging parts but you will be available as slow backup peer in case there is nobody else can serve whole fileset at the moment and some leechers arrived. So I guess you can already meet various goals with existing settings. As one corner case example:
30 * 1024 * 1024 = 31457280 (KiBs? per month allowed)
30 * 86400 = 2592000 (seconds in one month)
31457280 KiB / 2592000 s = 12 KiB/s (approx).

So, if you rate limit globally to 12 KiB/s or so, it will be hard to exceed monthly bandwidth for obvious reasons. This is fine for seeding in batch mode to support files availability in network with little or no human supervision. If you want to download fast and DLing popular files so you don't care about keeping them available for others, you can try high upload speeds instead, but use ratio to limit amount of data which will be sent for torrent (keep in mind that torrent download speed depends on your upload speed, so if ratio reached before download ends, you will have worst possible speed for remaining download).

2) As for me, it makes little sense to have 21Mbps link with 30Gb limit at all. What's the clue to pay for a decent bandwidth if you can't use it most of time anyway? Look, you can go just a bit over 12KiB/s in continuous mode, else you hit the limit! Your ISP just weird. For example my ISP (in Russia) offers 30Mbps symmetric link and I can go close to 3MiB/s UP and Down and ISP does not cares at all. They advertise it as flat rate and just holding their promise rather than selling me air and snake oil. So, my link traffic can go as high as 1-2 TiB per month or so. That's what I call "worth of it's moneys and without air". Should I mention that at these days it's also fairly cheap to purchase VDS or even a dedicated sever with a 300 to 1000GiB (or better) limits, etc? :) So if you're absolutely must use such a sucking ISP, you may want to set up such server and use it for fast downloading (which implies fast seeding) and then download file over HTTP (saving upload bandwidth on your sucking ISP link without giving up download speed or file availability and everyone will see IP of server rather than your IP as a bonus).

Note: I'm not a dev, just user who uses Transmission in numerous installations.

[livings124]

Unfortunately this is a really obscure feature. User294 has some good alternative suggestions - there are already ways to limit download/upload without a new relatively-complex setting.