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uTorrent now interfering with normal web browsing.


Moleculor

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My current upload bandwidth is a measly 8kb/sec, and that's absolute maximum.

With any previous BT application, I would have to limit my BitTorrent upload bandwidth to around 6kb/second to still be able to surf the internet at a reasonable rate of speed. Yes, that's UPLOAD speed, not DOWNLOAD speed. The reason being that if I allowed any BT client to simply use all my bandwidth, my browser couldn't request webpages fast enough.

With 1.6.1, the limit of 6kb/second is interfering with web browsing. If I reduce it to 5kb/second, my browsing returns to a reasonable speed (not lightning fast as if I weren't using a BT client at all, but I don't have to wait 10 seconds for every page either), but doing so limits my download speed.

Solutions? Beyond changing ISPs, that is.

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Hm. Well, doing so seems to have fixed the issue of not being able to browse quickly...

Of course, now my downloads are running at 1/6th their former speed.

So I've made additional adjustments (increasing the number of clients connecting at once to a little over half what I used to have it).

Torrents are now slower to get up to maxiumum speed. uTorrent doesn't seem to really follow download bandwidth limits as well as it used to. (And the number of torrents active at one time is screwed up like it always is unless I have it set to 1).

But thanks anyway. I think I can tweak things from here to at least be satisfactory.

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Moleculor said:

"And the number of torrents active at one time is screwed up like it always is unless I have it set to 1"

If your connection is such that you are potentially running more than 1 torrent per KB/sec of upload or download speed then more torrents may be started than your max torrent limit due to special settings in advanced settings to start more torrents if speeds are low.

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Moleculor,

I believe those settings were set that way by default...so you didn't have to change anything for them to "happen", all that had to occur was for you to start more torrents than your max active torrent limits. Queuing gets nuts with some torrents seeding, others downloading, and more than 1 running really slowly.

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I agree with you that what you're seeing easily qualifies as unexpected behavior. However it is a recommended setting for those who start LOTS of torrents with limited upload bandwidth. ...And when it comes to BitTorrent traffic, basically EVERYONE has limited upload bandwidth. =D

For regular broadband users, using low max active torrents with this unpredictable feature enabled is preferable to just setting max active torrents to 10 or more.

Otherwise, people who start lots of torrents at once would be uploading at horribly slow speeds to others (like the ~0.14 KB/sec average upload speed I calculated based on another person's settings on another thread). That's working as ordered, but in all practicality...it's worthless. To "fight" that, µTorrent (past about v1.5) automatically reduces the number of upload slots per torrent that it actually uses if it cannot reach at least ~0.5 KB/sec average upload speed per upload slot. Setting upload slots higher will not change that result, nor is there any mention to the user that anything is wrong. This happens even if "use additional upload slots if upload speed <90%" is checked. That may also sound like unexpected behavior, but the upload slots per torrent value is the maximum the program is supposed to use not the minimum. To obey the BitTorrent protocol rules and limitations the program must dynamically reduce used upload slots when upload speed is low.

There is also no way to even directly control which queued finished torrent will go active for seeding when there's more selected than your current max active torrents allows. It will almost randomly start 1 and queue another, based on some criteria known only to it's programming! You can change the priority of downloading torrents, but not seeding ones. I start and stop seeding torrents manually because of that unexpected, undesired unpredictability.

µTorrent was supposed to be getting a much-improved automated torrent queue system...with better manual controls too, but that is by the wayside for now because BitTorrent bought them out.

I too am very wary of software that tries to second-guess the user's input and make "corrections". (Microsoft is VERY bad about this, but that's far off-topic.) Sadly, many program makers do this anyway to avoid dealing with problems caused by "clueless (L)users", but they forget just how unappealing it is to have to fight with a computer to get it to do what it should be able to!

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http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=235469#p235469

They still are set to false, right...? Have you tried restarting µTorrent after setting them to false?

As for why it's doing that... µTorrent does that when the aforementioned advanced options are set to true and a torrent job is transferring at less than 1.0KiB/s. If a torrent job moves beyond 1.0KiB/s, other torrent jobs will stop automatically. µTorrent doesn't have to worry about speeds being nicely distributed to other peers in such a case, as 1.0KiB/s can't ever be distributed nicely, even if you have a single torrent started, so it looks for a torrent that actually does transfer faster, and when it finds it, it queues the others.

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The Speed Guide (CTRL+G) settings for xx/192k limits max active torrents to 1. That's 3 times your upload speed. So you're running with settings way beyond what Speed Guide recommends...which due to your low upload speed triggers the "start a bunch more torrents because upload and/or download speeds are too low".

But that only should occur if you've got:

queue.dont_count_slow_dl

queue.dont_count_slow_ul

set to "TRUE".

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