How can I throttle App Store download bandwidth

Question

How can I throttle App Store download bandwidth

Sure, normally I'll want App Store updates and new purchases to download as fast as it possibly can.

However, there are times I want to manually initiate updates and that's when App Store utterly *KILLS* all bandwidth of the network. I can't even load a web page when App Store is downloading an update. Everything times-out, and company phone (on VOIP) utterly shuts down completely. Other computers actually lose connections with network printers, it's utterly crazy.

Is there any possible way I can throttle the bandwidth being used by the App Store? At all?

I mean, seriously, this is ridiculous. Even Windows Update doesn't do this on our Windows boxes.

Posted on Mar 5, 2015 9:00 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Dah•veed

Level 9

64,633 points

Mar 5, 2015 10:51 AM in response to Pixietale Studios

Unless your IT folks have a way of throttling your Mac on the network, there isn't any way that you can reach out and control Apple's servers.

Save updates for after hours when the business is closed.

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Answer 2

Mar 6, 2015 4:24 AM in response to Dah•veed

Thanks for your response. Though it's not an Apple server issue I know that an app can also throttle what it pulls (for example: my USENET app can use multiple threads and even place a bandwidth limit on each, regardless how 'powerful' the server ability is. I have many other apps that can do the same.) Regardless, I marked this reply as "helpful" even though it's not the answer I was looking for (which is either where I can find the setting -or- there is no such setting in that app; I'll presume the latter).

And I know what you're thinking because I'm thinking the same thing: our network *****. 🙂

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Answer 3

Det0x

Level 1

4 points

Oct 31, 2016 7:55 PM in response to Pixietale Studios

MacOS comes with a firewall that allows you to establish a pipe that you can limit bandwidth with, I use it when I paid my MacBook to my iPad for Internet, this allows me to watch Netflix for hours without chewing up all my data cap. I get about 6hours per gb, (it's low def, but it does the trick)

Depending on what version of MacOS you have there are two ways to do this, before 10.8 it's ipfw. yosemite and up its pf.

There are graphical tools you can download, which make the process slightly easier, for Yosemite and above use either icefloor or murus, otherwise you can use slowy. These are all third party apps, but you can also use the network link conditioner found in Xcode under "hardware IO tools for Xcode"

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Answer 4

Nov 2, 2016 1:19 PM in response to Pixietale Studios

I have recently noticed communications with the App store version 2.0 (376.29) on my Yosemite Mac and I attempted to completely block communications to the 17.x.x.x network. But to my surprise it rerouted to Akamai network

96.16.67.205

173.223.64.156

I don;t know why the first IP I blocked and again it routed to the second IP but only after several minutes making me believe it was blocked. I would say there is no way to filter traffic.

However my question would be why there is that much traffic going to Apple's network. I don't use iCloud or and Itunes was not active yet there is continuos communications.

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