Any way to configure utorrent to auto-refresh speedboost/powerboost?

I have comcast and I see the effects of speedboost when I start up utorrent for the first time. I believe I'm under comcast's 8/2 plan and when I first start up utorrent I get download speeds of about 1.5mb/s and uploads speeds of 500kb/s, which is clearly the speedboost in effect.

From a little googling I found other people already trying to work on this, but those topics were from 2007. Apparantly you can recreate the initial powerboost by capping your utorrent speeds after your speeds normalize and then recap it at "unlimited." However, I do not wish to manually update speeds on a 500+mb task as that would require me to sit there for maybe up to a couple hours at a time refreshing speed caps. Is there any way to automate this task?

Here is the one thread that was closest to helping:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=22686

I was trying to make sense of Ultima's post but I don't understand how to do that >_<.

I have ComCast (still), and there's no good way to automatically take advantage of the speed bursts.

Hmm...Well, what's weird for me is that my download speed stays at a steady 1mb/s, but my upload speed goes all over the place from 260kb/s all the way up to 600kb/s when I set the upload cap to unlimited. This continues on past the initial speedburst time frame. So I was thinking my upload speeds are being re-speedboosted, which led me to think I could do the same for my download speed somehow.

Silly comcast and its speedboosts...leading to false speed test results and whatnot >_<.

Leaving uTorrent's upload speed max limit set to unlimited will be perceived as "excessive use" by ComCast...at least if you do it for more than a month. You probably won't get a letter, email, or get called...but eventually they will throttle your line.

Set your upload speed limit to 250-260 KB/sec for "normal" max speed and use the alternate upload speed limit or scheduler to temporarily raise the speed for about 2 minutes. When the upload speed has dropped down below ~300 KB/sec, switch back to the normal max upload speed.

Right, as of right now I have it limited to 200 since that's close to what was recommended in the "conservative speed chart." I'm just saying that leaving it on unlimited gives me more than what my advertised upload speed is at, since my plan is 8/2, and that's what I'm trying to figure out: why am I getting speeds above my advertised rate and if there was a way to take advantage of such situations (read HOW DO I ABUSE THIS?!?).

Also, a bit off topic, I posted something in the "chat" subforum but I don't see it there anymore. Did I post something that wasn't allowed? Or does the chat forum get a lot of activity so that it needs to be purged every few days?

If you're running with no limits, it puts a much larger burden on ComCast's shared network.

It runs faster because 200 KiloBYTES/sec < 2 megabit/sec.

I deleted your other post (the one in chat). If people don't see this one, that's too bad. It's practically spamming (to try to get someone's attention) when someone posts essentially the same question in multiple places.

if it works anything like the cox "speedboost" you'll never be able to make proper use of it

As a long time subscriber to cox high speed internet, i was quite pissed off when they pretended like they are upgrading their speed tiers and offering some garbage called "speedboost." I immediately noticed (when it was rolled out in my area) that my upload speed was no longer capable of sustaining max advertised speed. This was the first time I'd ever experienced a problem like this and it was frustrating me to all hell. It's now been exactly a year since this was implemented but i've managed to find ways to keep my upload steady at max speed.

anyways...

speedboost only kicks in if i'm not already utilizing my full upstream bandwidth. When it does become activated its performance is NOT proportional to the amount of time i had to upload below max speed to get it kicked in. Basically, if my max upload is ~200kB/s, i will have to reduce upload rate to about 150kB/s for a couple minutes. When I undo the upload cap, the speedboost becomes active and i'll see my upload rate rise to 400kB/s for a few seconds and then taper back down to advertised max speed.

what im trying to say is that if you are able to max out your line consistently, you'll find that (over a period of time) you're able to transfer more data than you would by "tricking" the network into thinking you need a speedboost. In the end, it's just not worth it because you're upload less in the long run

Thanks mouser. I figured if you could cap it at like, 95% of your rate, then somehow automatically undo the cap at a certain interval, the average of 95% and 200% over the long run WOULD be worth it, assuming I'm correct in my interpretation of how speedboost works.

As of right now I have it uploading at a constant 200kb/s rate. I will now give up on my dreams of abusing speed boost, haha.

Switek: I thought the topics were different enough to warrant two topics. My apologies. I didn't intend to spam the boards.

i've never had speedboost last any longer than 20 seconds. The worst part would be having to CONSTANTLY monitor your uploads and change bandwidth limitation so you could trigger the speedboost. Even if i had the time, i don't have the patience for something so tedious and repetitive.

i bet there is a way to get around it. i just haven't been able to figure it out

So here are some pictures of what's going on with my utorrent. Note that I am on 8/2, so technically my "max" upload rate should be around 250kb/s, if I calculated that correctly. I set my cap at 220kb/s, however, even when I set it lower (like 200 or even 180) I still get these results:

1second increments

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/5264/utorrent1s.jpg

5second increments

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/7524/utorrent5s.jpg

30second increments

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/2713/utorrent30s.jpg

I assure you it has nothing to do with peers dropping out and reconnecting.

Is this comcast throttling me?

Here's a closeup of speedboost in action:

http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/9472/utorrentcomcastspeedboo.png

And here's an "overview" on a larger scale:

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/8845/utorrentpyramids.png

It is not an accident that the peaks on the larger scale seem to hit the same level each time. ComCast "gives" something like 10-20 MB at faster speeds, regardless of how much faster the speeds end up being. But either way, at the 5 minute graph interval the entire speedboost still almost always fits inside 1 sample time, (of 5 minutes) so the average upload speed is the same.

rurouni,

That looked like connection die-offs I saw with uTP problems (mentioned in the announcement threads for v1.9 and v2.0 alpha/beta versions) and also another bug when upload slots per torrent are set to 1 (or forced to 1 by uTorrent auto-limiter):

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=56897

How would utorrent force to 1 upload slot? And at the moment my upload slots per torrent are set to 8. Even with upload slots at 8, would I still run into trouble with the "more slots if <90%" setting checked? I'm trying to make sense of the topics you linked to, switeck, but I'm having trouble understanding because my level of understanding much else besides "how to download" and "how to upload" with torrents is rather limited.

Just as reference, here is my bandwidth settings. Also, I am using uTorrent 1.8.4 Build 16688:

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/2906/utorrentbadnwidth.jpg

And for additional reference, here are the "connection," "bittorrent," and "queueing" settings just in case:

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/7654/utorrentconnection.jpg

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/4157/utorrentbittorrent.jpg

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/8854/utorrentqueueing.jpg

Additional photos for what my client looks like during the "good" upload times:

http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/631/utorrentoverviewgood.jpg

And what happens during the times when the upload speed crashes to near 0 speeds:

http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/4089/utorrentoverviewbad.jpg

This is the speeds bouncing back up:

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/774/utorrentoverviewgoodaga.jpg

I fear I may have been driven completely off topic. Still, I appreciate the help.

switeck is right

I was having the exact same problem and it drove me f'ing nuts trying to figure out what was causing it. The speedboost is a burst of upload speed BUT when it kicks in and dies out there shouldnt be any bandwidth compromised. It won't give you extra upload speed and then take it away to balance out....unless of course you weren't uploading at max speed anyways which isn't really caused by anything besides a small swarm (barring the obvious connectable issues and whatnot)

what is your bt.trans.disp set at? if you hover your mouse over the utorrent icon in your system tray (bottom right, next to the clock) how many torrents does it say you are seeding?

i used to have 100+ torrents seeding at once but only a few of those were actually active...usually 3 or 4. So, one day i decided to just leave ONE torrent seeding and stop everything else...after the torrent reached 4 peers i was uploading STEADILY at my max speed. It was the first time in months that i'd been able to maintain my full line upload speed without those same dips you are having in the screenshots you provided.

are these torrents ones that you are uploading yourself? if so, do you use initial-seeding?

mouser: My bt.trans.disp is at 13. I don't have any clue what that means though =S.

When I mouse over the icon it says 12(12) seeding. I'm pretty sure my case isn't like the case switeck posted in which people were seeding 100+ torrents, similar to your case too.

These are not my uploads. I am just helping seeding after I completed my downloads.

Those settings in the pictures I posted are exactly what I've set my settings to. If you need more information I'll gladly post more pictures. It just bugs me when things aren't running efficiently.

change bt.trans.disp to 5--->save changes--->exit utorrent

when you see that utorrent process is no longer running in task manager go ahead and start up utorrent again and see if it helps at all.

After reading switecks original post regarding the utp bug he found a few months ago...and, of course, the recommendations in the "tweaking/troubleshooting" guides (which i did not follow lol), I decided to change the bt.trans.disp to 5 as suggested. I'm not sure if this was what fixed things for me because honestly i dont know exactly what changed. But, i'm pretty sure it was right after i changed it to 5 that my troubles went away.

Hopefully it'll work for you

Just changed the settings. Will let this run for about a day before I come back here whining for more help =). Thanks for everything so far though mouser and switeck.

Oddly enough, for the last hour or two I was getting a stable 220kb/s up, before I even changed it. Perhaps it's comcast, perhaps it's my own inability to optimize utorrent. Either way, I'll let this new setting run for a while.

Turn on DEBUG column -- the last number is max allowed upload slots for that torrent.

If it ever drops to 1 or 2, you've got problems.

uTP's automatic bandwidth throttling would effectively allow you to set the upload rate to unlimited, and if the SpeedBoost/PowerBoost kicks in, it can theoretically scale up and back down gracefully.

Switeck: Alright, cool, none of columns have been dropping to 1 or 2. Could you explain what the other numbers mean though? And why is it that the max allowed upload slots change for each torrent? For example, I set my max upload slots per torrent to be 8, but right now all of them are reading 7 on the right most column.

Ultima: This is essentially what I was looking for from my first post. My apologies for going off topic. But yes, what is this uTP and how would I go about utilizing it? Or where could I go to get more information on this?

1st number is the current number of half open connections for that torrent.

2nd number is how many additional upload slots beyond normal max are allowed for that torrent -- this should only be above 0 if your current upload speed is <90% max.

3rd number is max allowed upload slots for that torrent.

There seems little rhyme or reason for variations in the max upload slots...but it is based on your current upload speed.

uTP is not an effective solution, at least in my case:

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/6498/utorrentv20utpchaos.png

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/5558/utorrentv20utpturnedon.png

Well, despite changing bt.trans.disp to 5, I am still getting spikes. None of my debug columns seem to be reporting 1's on the 3rd number.

Here's a picture of it being somewhat stable for the last few minutes:

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/6939/utorrentspikes.jpg

A little after though it crashed to 0kb/s again, similar to what had been going on for the last few hours of the above picture.

The middle number of debug for one of my torrents shows 10 at the point of crashing, so I assume that just means it's finding additional upload slots because my speed is so low, but I think that's in response to the crash, and not a cause of the crash.

Currently I'm running a Glasnost test just in case. I will try to post results in a little bit.

EDIT: Glasnost test results: http://tinyurl.com/yff4575

Apparantly I'm not being throttled.

ComCast may be throttling in a manner that does not normally "trip" Glasnost detection methods.

They are indeed sometimes throttling BitTorrent in my area:

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/4030/comcast091103throttling.png

"The middle number of debug for one of my torrents shows 10 at the point of crashing"

The middle number means uTorrent is allowing more upload slots beyond max because upload speed is currently far lower than your set upload speed limit.