Android: how to limit download speed

Question

I use AndroidHttpClient to download videos from internet. There are ways to increase download speed, but I want to know how to slow down the download speed using AndroidHttpClient or HttpURLConnection ? Is there any interfaces or configuration for that or some solution ?

****************update*****************

Have done some test, found that as Matthew Franglen suggested, Thread.sleep(value) can be a solution. The main magic is to determine the value for thread to sleep. The test result is as below

no thread sleep
11-06 20:05:14.510: D/DownloadThread(6197): Current speed = 1793978

sleep 0.001s
11-06 20:02:28.433: D/DownloadThread(5290): Current speed = 339670

sleep 0.062
11-06 20:00:25.382: D/DownloadThread(4410): Current speed = 65036

sleep 0.125s
11-06 19:58:56.197: D/DownloadThread(3401): Current speed = 33383

sleep 0.25s
11-06 19:57:21.165: D/DownloadThread(2396): Current speed = 15877

sleep 0.5s
11-06 19:55:16.462: D/DownloadThread(1253): Current speed = 8061

sleep 1s
11-06 19:53:18.917: D/DownloadThread(31743): Current speed = 3979

The test shows if sleep for one second, the download drops drastically to about 1/450 !

While this depends on what kinds operations have done in the downloading loop, and depends on the enviromnet. this is a experimental conclusion under specific case

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 06 '13 at 09:58

1

Slowing the download speed is quite simple. Just read from the InputStream more slowly:

public byte[] rateLimitedDownload(InputStream in, int bytesPerSecond) throws IOException {
    ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    byte[] buffer = new byte[bytesPerSecond];
    int read;

    while ((read = in.read(buffer)) != -1) {
        out.write(buffer, 0, read);
        try {
            Thread.sleep(1000);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            // nothing
        }
    }
    return out.toByteArray();
}

This code isn't perfect - any time spent actually reading from in is not considered, and reads may be less than expected. It should give you an idea though.

answered Nov 06 '13 at 09:58

Matthew Franglen

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Thanks. i have done the similar thing before. While this has the limit that, it needs sleep for a relatively bigger value for lower download speed. If the values is several seconds, this may seems the download stops to the user for a long time. I think the perfect thing is to download in a low speed non-stop, but i dont know how to.. – mianlaoshu Nov 06 '13 at 11:14
Download a smaller amount instead of sleeping for a longer time. – Matthew Franglen Nov 06 '13 at 14:41
There is a caveat to this: because the OS buffers incoming data, until the buffer is filled up, it'll be downloading at max speed. This is not much of an issue for long running downloads (e.g. videos) though. If you were using `Socket` class yourself, you could give a hint to the OS to use a small receive buffer using `setReceiveBufferSize()` as to avoid this issue. – Mansour Aug 16 '14 at 17:11

Android: how to limit download speed

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