Inconsistent Upload Speeds, Steady DL Speed Though

[FadedAway]

*This is all while just seeding! No downloads are going on in the process*

Well... I've just about gone insane from the "tease" upload speeds I get every so often. My problem pretty much is that my upload speeds are being very inconsistent (as the title says). When I start Utorrent my speeds will start going up and usually peek around 80 - 100 kB/s (about a total of 180 kB/s of all the uploads together). Great huh? Yeah well it lasts about 30 sec.. then they drop and drop and drop till they get to around 2 - 4 kB/s and then they'll work their way back up again. Sometimes they'll stay at a -somewhat- steady 20 - 40 kB/s on the main one and about 50 - 60 kB/s total.

I go from this:

To this (after about 30 sec - 1 min of being up at the high speeds):

It doesn't stay low for the most part, it starts to work it's way back up immediately, sometimes staying at 20 - 40 kB/s for a good while (on the top one). Oh and the reason you don't see the top one from the first pic on there, is because it went all the way down to 0.0 kB/s. That's what's so weird.. it doesn't slow down, it just immediately drops after a while. Directly from 120+ to below 10 kb/s!

Still though..

Could I not be connecting to enough peers, or perhaps I am and just not staying connected? I've never seen myself go over 20 peers with all my seeding torrents put together. I'll usually connect to about 1 - 7 peers per torrent, when one drops another torrent will pick one up.. seemingly keeping it about 20 peers altogether. Anyhow.. Now for the info!

Main uploading torrent: 3.57g

24 seeds 37 peers

Connected to 3 peers

Upload speed 38.7 kB/s

Peek 134.6 kB/s

Average 22.4 kB/s

I have others seed at about 2 - 15 kB/s here and there. Usually I'll have a main seeding torrent and then a secondary one at about half that speed. They both fluctuate. My main goal is to get them to stay at that high speed I see them jump at every so often (at about 80 - 120 kB/s steady would be wonderful..).

Well, I think I've rambled on enough.. so I'll just leave the rest for tidbits of info that may help you help me

# Test Speeds:

Download Speed: 20383 kbps (2547.9 KB/sec transfer rate) (From a private tracker, I usually DL at around 1 mB/s - 1.75 mB/s on well seeded torrents)

Upload Speed: 1511 kbps (188.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

# Color of the network status light in µTorrent's status bar: Green

# What the Speed Guide shows your settings to be: I've played around with this a lot, haven't really seen much of a difference.. but anyhow my current setting are:

Upload Limit: 0

Connections per torrent: 500

Max Active Torrents: 15

Upload slots: 8

Connections Global: 750

Max Active Downloads: 8

# Operating system installed: Windows XP Professional SP2

# Security software installed: McAfee Security Center, Windows Firewall, Spyware Doctor. (Yes ports are forwarded correctly)

# Router: D-Link DI-624 (Yes ports are forwarded correctly)

Edit: # Modem: Terayon TJ 715x

# ISP: Comcast

# Connection type: High-speed Cable (6MB tier)

Thanks for reading it all!

[Ultima]

So um, why are you using arbitrary settings without understanding their consequences? Select xx/1Mbit and increase your upload limit to 150KiB/s.

[FadedAway]

Well I was using the 1Mbit settings.. originally. But I started fiddling around with them from things I read on various websites. None of the changes made a difference Either way it still did / does that sudden drop from 120ish kB/s to below 10. I'll put the settings back to how you suggested, since they probably should be anyhow, and it'll help you guys help me solve the problem with more ease.

[Ultima]

If the upload rate drops to 0 and increases again, it's an indication that your connection *is* getting overloaded. What modem are you using? Additionally, your router is known to be stupid and can only handle 200 connections or less. So set your connection limit to 150.

[FadedAway]

Roger that, and yeah.. I've never liked my router lol. My modem is: Terayon TJ 715x

Thanks for the replies

Oh and what router would you suggest that would be good for utorrent / overall usage, while still being a decent price... Because honestly, my current router has caused nothing but trouble

[Firon]

That's a pretty good modem. I had that same one at home, worked beautifully.

[FadedAway]

Yeah my modem, contrary to my router, is actually quite nice. I remember the huge upgrade we got from moving up from DSL hehe.

[Ultima]

WRT54GL with a third-party firmware like Thibor's (Firon's favorite) or Tomato (what I'm using right now) works excellently as a router.

[FadedAway]

I'll have to look into that, thanks!

On the note of my upload speeds, they're no longer suddenly dropping. However, they are still peeking at 120 - 150, staying there for about 5 seconds then falling back down to about 30 - 50. Is this normal? The torrent has 25 seeds and 252 peers. Just surprising that my upload speeds are so .. jumpy while my download speeds are usually quite steady.

Thanks for the responses

[Ultima]

Try lowering the upload rate by 10 at a time to see if it stops doing that. If it doesn't by the time you reach... 100 (?), then it might be the torrent (or still yet your router being stupid ).

[FadedAway]

Will do, thanks!

Oh and lol, whenever I try downloading open office or slackware I only get up to 100 kB/s. However, when downloading well seeded torrents off of a private tracker I can get near 1.5 mB/s. Weird eh? O.o

Edit: So.. I was watching the peer statistics on a torrent I was downloading, as well as one I was seeding. And I noticed that I would have people uploading to me at a steady rate of around 50 kB/s +. They would stay there on the list for a long time, however when I watched my peer list on the torrent I was seeding I noticed that when I would be uploading a steady 35+ on a peer (and usually it'd keep rising, sometimes getting up to 90+, but not always), they would only stay on the list for about 1 min before disappearing.. while the other people I was uploading to (who would be getting about 2 - 5 kB/s each from me) would stay. Is this caused by my router? I don't really connect to a lot of peers either.. out of say 200, I'd only connect to about 2 - 7.

[Ultima]

Do you have initial seeding on for the seeding torrent?

[FadedAway]

No, should I? Heh

[Ultima]

Nope. As far as I can tell, there isn't much else left for you to try -- it seems it's just a problem with the swarm.

[duntkno]

pretty sure its a comcast problem, i've got it too. and yea its not swarm.

[Salt]

I agree completely that it's a Comcast caused problem. I had this very same problem back on Adelphia right around when Comcast bought them out but then it just magically started working after a few days. I believe that it takes their system 10-30 seconds to 'recognize' the BT traffic and then they kill the connection. Your BT client initiates a new connection to the peer a while later and you are able to upload for another 10-30 seconds before the connection gets recognized and killed again. This behavior occurs even with encryption and lazy bitfield enabled on multiple BT clients.

This system is not being used on the entire Comcast network because there are plenty of people that don't experience this problem but it's not just a coincidence that everyone experiencing this behavior is on Comcast. They are doing something to filter traffic (even on the voip port) and it looks like it may be time to dump them as an ISP if you have other options.

[Switeck]

I've found better results when I keep my total connections below 30. In other words only 1-2 torrents that don't have a lot of peers. But they have to have at least 5 peers each to keep upload speed maxed out. I presume this is due to bad ISPs I'm uploading to as well as any problems with my ISP.

...on Comcast as well.

[Nowornever2vi]

I know this forum is about 3 years old, but have you tried changing your congestion provider to" ctcp " from the default value. (Most, if not all routers now support this feature)!

To Change the Congestion Provider open CMD under admin, and type " netsh int tcp set heuristics disabled ". Then type " netsh int tcp set global congestionprovider=ctcp ". Finished, the other global settings you'll have to research depending on what settings you want!

After I applied this and restarted my pc, my downloads your a steady 2.0 - 2.5 mb/s. Enjoy.....