I'd like to ramp the rate on my end-node up to the full 50KB capacity of
the line when
I'm done using my ADSL connection for the day, but can't now do this
without stopping / restarting Tor, re-writing the config file, etc.
You don't need to restart tor. Just update the config file and then do something like
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/tor/tor.pid`
I guess you could have several config files and use cron to copy
whichever one you wanted to use at that time to /etc/tor, or you could
update just the bandwith section by calling e.g. sed.
Hope this helps,
Toruser