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The cURL project
Network and protocols
Install curl
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Build curl
Command line basics
Using curl
Verbose
Version
Persistent connections
Downloads
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Stop slow transfers
Rate limiting
Request rate limiting
Connections
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.netrc
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Reading email
Sending email
MQTT
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TELNET
DICT
TLS
Copy as curl
HTTP with curl
FTP with curl
Using libcurl
HTTP with libcurl
Bindings
libcurl internals
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Rate limiting
When curl transfers data, it will attempt to do that as fast as possible. It goes for both uploads and downloads. Exactly how fast that will be depends on several factors, including your computer's ability, your own network connection's bandwidth, the load on the remote server you are transferring to/from and the latency to that server. And your curl transfers are also likely to compete with other transfers on the networks the data travels over, from other users or just other apps by the same user.
In many setups, however, you will find that you can more or less saturate your own network connection with a single curl command line. If you have a 10 megabit per second connection to the Internet, chances are curl can use all of those 10 megabits to transfer data.
For most use cases, using as much bandwidth as possible is a good thing. It makes the transfer faster, it makes the curl command complete sooner and it will make the transfer use resources from the server for a shorter period of time.
Sometimes you will, however, find that having curl starve out other network functions on your local network connection is inconvenient. In these situations you may want to tell curl to slow down so that other network users get a better chance to get their data through as well. With --limit-rate [speed] you can tell curl to not go faster than the given number of bytes per second. The rate limit value can be given with a letter suffix using one of K, M and G for kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.
To make curl not download data any faster than 200 kilobytes per second:
curl https://example.com/ --limit-rate 200K
The given limit is the maximum average speed allowed, counted during the entire transfer. It means that curl might use higher transfer speeds in short bursts, but over time it uses no more than the given rate.
Also note that curl never knows what the maximum possible speed is—it will simply go as fast as it can and is allowed. You may know your connection's maximum speed, but curl does not.
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