A system and method include initiating a live migration of a virtual machine from a first host machine to a second host machine. The system and method include copying an initial copy of data stored in a memory of the first host machine to a memory of the second host machine, determining a set of modified data, determining that transferring the set of modified data exceeds a downtime limit, calculating an increased throttling amount based on a rate of data copying and a rate of data change using from the set of modified data, determining the increased throttling amount does not exceed a throttling limit, applying the increased throttling to the virtual machine executing on the first host machine, and copying the set of modified data while the increased throttling is applied to the virtual machine executing on the first host machine.