You should be using an external traffic shaper. Rate limiting isn't something that should be built into each and every piece of networking software on the internet.
It would probably be fairly easy to set a hard limit in the bitcoin client, but it is far from optimal.
Topic: [Request] Bandwidth limits (Read 814 times)
I am mining solo, and I want to be a core node of the peer-to-peer network (to improve propagation of my mined blocks.) Limiting the rate of bulk uploads to 50% of my outgoing connection solves that problem. Limiting the download rate is only for symmetry.
You of course don't need the bitcoin daemon running all the time unless you are mining solo. If you are solo then look into the flag -nolisten or something similar. I may be incorrect but I would assume if you don't accept incoming connections you won't be relaying data. You might be able to tell the daemon to listen on a nonstandard port if -nolisten isn't available.
I would like to limit the bandwidth usage of the client. I have a bitcoin daemon running all the time to support mining, but on occasion it uploads large chunks of data to other clients. This causes my latency to spike in online games which is irritating. A pair of programmable bandwidth caps (upload/download) would lessen the impact of distributing the block chain during gaming sessions.
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