How to limit network usage for concrete application in linux that is running in it?

I'm looking for something like nice for cpu, but for network usage that will limit application network consumption to level that will configure.

I have problems with xapian-replicate-server that is consuming 80 % of my network. It's causing mysql connections problem (mysql server is working on this machine too). I can't move xapian or mysql to other machine so i need to limit xapian network usage to a decent level.

Is there any tool that will help me do this ?

tc, iptables etc can all do this, but just to be different:

You can use Linux kernel feature cgroups and its net_cls module for limiting xapian-replicate-server. Something like this should do:

mount -t cgroup -onet net /sys/fs/cgroup
cd /sys/fs/cgroup
mkdir xapian-replicate-server
/bin/echo $$ > xapian-replicate-server/tasks
/bin/echo 2048 > xapian-replicate-server/net.tcp
/bin/echo 4096 > xapian-replicate-server/net.tot
however_you_launch_xapian-replicate-server

This would create a new cgroup for Xapian and give it total of 2048 kilobytes/s TCP traffic bandwidth and 4096 kilobytes/s of total whatever network traffic bandwidth.

Seems like "trickle" could work for you: http://monkey.org/~marius/trickle/