Yet another traffic shaper but this time, it is lightweight and runs on userspace. Named trickle, it "is a portable lightweight userspace bandwidth shaper. It can run in collaborative mode (together with trickled) or in stand alone mode."
Anze Vidmar writes another excellent article for Linux.com. This is extremely useful for those with slow network connections.
Armijn Hemel says this about trickle, "All in all I can say that "trickle" is a quite nifty tool and probably your best choice if you're looking for an easy to use flexible bandwidth shaper."
So if your needs are not that complex, I'd recommend that you give this little critter a go and see how it improves your bandwidth utilization.