Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to play with tc by hand, especially if the last time you did it was a few years ago and you have an immediate need to fix a problem right now.
trickle and wondershaper might be what you're looking for.
wondershaper is a wrapper around the tc tools to allow easy shaping of traffic for entire interfaces.
trickle simply uses LD_PRELOAD to limit traffic throughput from a single command, which is usually what people want to do when they realise they're completely borking the network with a particular ad-hoc command.