This seems like a really cool idea.
Thank you
The throttling issue applies not just to network connections, but to
writing to the same disk where skipping from one area of the disk to
another is slow; it's quicker to finish one task completely before
starting the next. There could be some sort of priority system so that
more interactive tasks could jump the queue: "just hold on for a moment,
Transmission -- Gimp wants to save a 140-MB file to the same disk right
now".
You could probably do something like forcing transmission to run in the ionice idle class and set similar classes for the other desktop apps accordingly. At least to test if the approach would make any difference.
David