I wonder why there isn't more effort put in the direction of implementing QoS mechanisms (like throttling blockchain downloads) in the protocol. After all, the network as a whole does not become more efficient when single nodes hog down other nodes due to misconfigured blockchain downloading.
It's complicated. TL;DR the consensus is that first we need to fix the inefficiencies in how Bitcoin Core transmits data, as that could alleviate many of the problems. Here's the 3 year long debate on the subject:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/273Yeah, I found that discussion a while ago, am a bit frustrated that nothing seems to be done about it. Just throttled bitcoin-qt's upload bandwidth to 300k with Netbalancer, about 1/3 of my maximum upload speed and it seems to be helping my computer run a lot faster than it used to be, so it looks like I won't be needing that RAM upgrade after all. Netbalancer is free - in case any other Windows users are having this problem, though the free version will only let you shape the bandwidth of three processes, that's plenty for me since bitcoin-qt is the only one giving me grief.