[rdiff-backup-users] Throttling

[Dave Steinberg]

Hello Ben and list,

In an effort to keep my bandwidth costs down, I've been investigating using
'throttle', a bandwidth limiting pipe, to slow down rdiff-backup.  It copies
stdin to stdout and at most as fast as the specified rate.  Some odd notes:

(1) I know about --sleep-ratio, but it doesn't actually help me due to the
way I am billed.  I am billed on 95% peak usage, ergo, if rdiff-backup uses
1600kbps every 30 seconds, that doesn't help me as much as if it used 100
kbps 100% of the time.  The former would cause my bills to go up, the latter
would not.  If I was billed on average usage, then --sleep-ration would
suffice.
(2) I've tried playing with --remote-schema as such:
--remote-schema 'ssh %s "throttle -k 100 | rdiff-backup --server"'
And
--remote-schema 'ssh %s "rdiff-backup --server | throttle -k 100"'

But neither work.  Using --verbosity 9, I see that it establishes the
connection and then just hangs; presumably throttle is waiting for input on
stdin.

Could anyone comment whether this behavior is impossible or if I've just
mucked up the details somewhere?

Thanks for your time!

-- 
Dave Steinberg
http://www.geekisp.com