rate-limiting my downloads of img files

    Good Year, LibreELECers

    I understand this might be a slightly impolite question, but I do occasionally wonder about it:

    Sometimes, when I feel like being a good netizen, I rate-limit my wget downloads to ease strain on the download servers. Usually to --limit-rate=100k.

    Does this actually make the world a better place? In the case of LibreELEC, if I set it to 200k, the download rarely, if ever, fails to hit 200k....So I wonder if I could actually determine a polite max speed by e.g. setting to a brazillion k, and only reducing that if I fail to constantly attain this limit?

    Basically, if wget constantly attains the limit I set, that means I am not eating anyone else's lunch, and I could even think about cranking it up a bit?

    I think this this kinda assumes you pay a set fee for a set hosting speed, whether you "use" it or not?

    LE provides all core downloads via 3rd party mirror servers: https://releases.libreelec.tv/mirrorstats

    It is possible for some users to download direct of our infrastructure, but those downloads are a minority and do not use enough bandwidth to concern or cause expense to the project. So we don't really care if you set rate limits or run at full speed. The other 99.99% of users will be downloading from a mirror; so all the bandwidth consumed is someone else's - donated for free for that purpose.

    Almost all open-source projects do some variant of the same thing (hosting on GitHub, via mirrors, via some major repo, etc.) so while it's nice to be a good netizen, you're probably over-thinking this issue.