Bwlimit not limiting upload bandwidth to Amazon Drive

I’m attempting to limit the bandwidth used when copying from local storage to Amazon Drive, however --bwlimit appears to have no effect. Regardless of the rate I set, my 5Mb upload pipe is being saturated. Terminal output states “Starting bandwidth limiter at”, so I feel I’ve entered the command correctly. I’ve also tried limiting transfers and checkers to 1, but the effect is the same. The command I’m using is as follows:

rclone copy /mnt/data/localfiles/ amazon:folder/subfolder --bwlimit 1M -c --max-size 50G --transfers 1 --checkers 1

Any insight into this issue is appreciated.

testing it now but looks fine --bwlimit=1M add = and it works fine . may have better luck with command below

rclone --bwlimit=1M -c --max-size=50G --transfers=1 --checkers=1 -v copy /mnt/data/localfiles/ amazon:folder/subfolder

If your line is 5 Mbit/s then you’ll want a bwlimit of 0.5MBytes/s - rclone measures its limits in bytes/s not bits/s (I use a factor of 10 not 8 normally to allow for other overheads). So I’d recommend you use --bwlimit 0.5M or maybe a bit less --bwlimit 0.4M and see how that looks.

The best way of testing how well you are doing is to ping something external then start a transfer and ping something again -when you get it right the ping time shoudn’t change much whether the transfer is running or not.

You can have checkers and transfers at whatever value you like - the default should do fine.

The problem was bits vs. bytes. Thanks for the fast help. This is a great tool and I’m glad it was just a user issue.

Glad we got it sorted.

I’ve put a new paragraph in the docs about --bwlimit to help people in the future

Note that the units are Bytes/s not Bits/s. Typically connections are measured in Bits/s - to convert divide by 8. For example let’s say you have a 10 Mbit/s connection and you wish rclone to use half of it - 5 Mbit/s. This is 5/8 = 0.625MByte/s so you would use a --bwlimit 0.625M parameter for rclone.