Up and down speeds dropping to 25% the normal ones

[Vitor Cassol]

First of all: hello ^^

I searched the forum to find other speed dropping problems. I found many, but none seemed like mine.

I have a 200kbps down / 200kbps up (I know there's a word for down = up but I don't remember it ^^) cable connection. My modem is not a router. My speed settings are as far as I can tell currently near perfection, after exaustive testing (I'll put them later on)

Everything was fine until yesterday. Today, uTorrent (latest stable, 1.7.5) doesn't seem to want to work properly anymore.

Its download speed (with 5 downloading torrents in paralell, later increased to 8) dropped from about 20 kB/s to about 5 kB/s. Its upload speed, with no less than 10 seeding torrents (ignoring the downloading ones) dropped from 19 kB/s (limit I had set, later decreased to 16 kB/s) to about 6 kB/s.

After loads of waiting, nothing changes. The speeds continue dialup-like. From time to time one of the speeds (either up or down) increases, sometimes getting near the limits (connection limit or user-set limit), but after some time it drops again.

Let's see my downloading (I dislike the "leeching" word and normally use it for non-contributors who download and disappear) torrents now. One of them has more than 300 peers (I'm currently connected to 20) and 60 seeds (I'm connected to 5). Other has 30 seeds (connected to 8) and 25 peers (connected to 5). Others are in private trackers, and so have less leechers and seeds. The thing is, with three of those torrents I always got full download speeds. No torrent-specific upload or download limit is set.

As far as my seeding torrents are concerned, there should be no worries either; summing up all of my seeding torrents I'm connected to more than a hundred peers, and there aren't many seeds in any but two of them.

One of the things that I did was uninstalling uTorrent and removing every trace of it I could find, thus making disappear the old settings and all. Therefore I can't tell you the old "Affected Settings" in the Speed Guide; only the current ones.

They are:

Up Limit: 16 kB/s (previously 19 kB/s)

Up slots: 4

Connections: 60

Connections (global): 400

Max active torrents: 20

Max active downloads: 8

I tried setting the Connection Type setting (in the Speed Guide) to xx/192k (the nearest mine). The global speeds managed to get even worse.

I tried adding to the game the seeding-stopped torrents and the torrent queue (as I call the ones not even allocated yet), with more 7 seeding and 12 leeching torrents (resetting the "max active" settings to fit the new scenario). No use; the global speeds continued horrible and the torrent-specific ones got even worse.

I even got the Slackware torrent suggested in the Setup Guide; nothing changed. The torrent's speeds were in the league of the nearest from zero I've ever seen. I mean it all right.

Protocol encription is enabled, allowing legacy incoming. My ISP (NET Virtua, a Brazilian cable ISP) is known to use traffic shaping, but up until yesterday I managed to avoid it with the necessary encription settings.

I use lazy bitfield.

Well, I think that's about everything. I don't feel like I'm missing any important information.

Can you tell me what the matter is and how to solve it?

Any other information you need to help me, please ask away. Just fire away! ^^

Thanks in advance,

Vitor Cassol.

[Switeck]

Symmetric connections = equal amount of download and upload speeds.

With 20 torrents running at once, chances are you may be leeching at least one of them.

Even worst-case scenario, you shouldn't need more than 4 torrents active at once to get decent upload+download speeds. And really, with your connection more than 3 is probably excessive unless those torrents are nearly dead.

You may need to disable a lot of µTorrent's features to hide further from your ISP's throttling techniques. This means disable: DHT, Local Peer Discovery, Resolve IPs, legacy connections, and even reduce half open connections as low as 1.

[Vitor Cassol]

Thanks for your reply. I saw it about half an hour ago and tried the things you said. Now let's see.

This means disable: DHT, Local Peer Discovery, Resolve IPs, legacy connections, and even reduce half open connections as low as 1.

I did all that, forcing encryption for incoming and outgoing and all the stuff. Then, I restarted uTorrent. No result at all; the speeds are the same.

I talked to a friend who uses uTorrent, the same version with the same ISP in the same city, and he has no speed problems so far. At least I know it's not likely to be the ISP; anyway, I'll take a further look at this possibility; they may be picking random users to test their new technique... Oh well.

Since the result is horribly near zero, I am sadder than before , but still hoping ^^. Is there anything else I can do?

Thanks again.

UPDATE some good long hours afterwards:

I was actually gonna double-post, because it's been quite a while since the last post and therefore many people would not see the update, but then the system stopped me. Oh well.

I'm gonna talk further in this post about my experience with other clients. As far as I can tell by the rules it's not forbidden to say their names; if it is, I ask the moderators to remove the names and put things like "client #x" and so. ^^

I've been searching among other Virtua (my ISP) users, whatever client may they use, but especially uTorrent. So far, no one seems to be having the problems I do if they have the same shaping-destroyer settings. Even without thouse killer options Switeck told me, they experience no troubles as far I as know. I still haven't given up finding out other unlucky users like me, though.

I've been testing what happens when I put the same torrents in other clients. I like feature-full clients, so I've been using Azureus and uTorrent for as far as I can remember. I used Azureus, but it started to have exactly the same speed problem after a while; that's when I switched to uTorrent. Well, I tested Azureus again. I'm not very joyful to inform that I got the same results uTorrent's been giving me. Talking to friends and searching, I decided to test this other client I had never heard about called Deluge.

It looks fairly good, and it's very easy to configurate, but I was kind of shocked to find out there's no way it's going to recheck the existing files when added. Apparently it's just my luck going nuts again, because it seems the client should do so. Oh well. After opening uTorrent and telling it to recheck the torrents I had added (praying they didn't get much destroyed), I decided to add to Deluge the new ones, the ones I had not or had barely started. 12 leeching torrents. Nothing as a good old fresh start. I also found out you can't change the download folder name (unlike uTorrent). I was back then hoping it was not an uTorrent bug, but actually a problem with my ISP, because the one that looked best was actually so poor... After I closed uTorrent and started downloading, the speed that in uTorrent hardly got much past 6 kB/s at any given time, estabilished the new record of... 7 kB/s. Doh.

So I must say I'm pretty near blaming my ISP. I just can't seem to find ways around this, nor understand why the killer options don't change anything, nor understand why no one else has problems like mine. It's like they had found a way to pick on me specifically - but I use a poor old 200kbps connection, then why would they?!

Since I don't give in without a fight, I'm gonna test some other clients and see what happens. I might find a way out of this mess.

[Switeck]

Take your whole computer to your friend's house where s/he doesn't have any problems and continue testing there, if that's reasonably possible. If there's spare computer equipment there, you'll only need to take your computer case, not your mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc. You may also want to take your router (if you have one) and whatever LAN cable/s you use to confirm whether they're going bad.

That will put to rest any ideas that the problem is your computer itself.

[Vitor Cassol]

... any ideas that the problem is your computer itself

Now, I'm ashamed to say I had to wait for someone to tell me that possibility, because I was too stupid to see it. Oh well, I suppose that happens sometimes.

Before I saw your reply, a friend told me the same thing on MSN. He didn't manage to bring his computer here, and I couldn't do the opposite either, but he helped me to see I could solve it if it was a Windows problem. I have such a luck with Windows, you know, I sometimes come across some really strange problems...

I wasn't spending a single second (I'd already spent so many) trying to understand Windows' troubles; in such cases, I find it easier to kill them all. Time for our good old friend, the OS installation CD, to get out of its box and show up.

I spent the last whole hours setting up some elementary things in the computer, such as drivers and firewall and uTorrent (very important ^^) and all that stuff. I still got loads to do, though. uTorrent hadn't yet managed speeds of 100% what I had before, but I did see a definite improvement, with up and down speeds of about 17~18 kB/s.

At least I didn't have reasons to be annoyed. I use a system partition for system and apps only, and keep downloads, installers, images, documents, and so forth, in a second, big partition. And it was time already I formatted the system; it was going terribly slow if we consider the computer's configuration.

Now, the reason I'm editing the post and putting so many verbs in past tenses (they were originally in the present, you know): for some akward reason, uTorrent is acting crazy in what concerns speed. It gets stuck in this 5~6 kB/s, say, zone, and then after some time (may be two minutes may be two hours) it gets good speeds as the ones I told you before in this post, and then after some minutes it drops to something from 10 to 14 kB/s, and then it may go up or down again... Put it simple, the speeds keep changing. It would even be normal, if it wasn't by the fact that I'm using the very same peer-and-seed-full torrent files that gave me full speeds before.

I noticed that when uTorrent gets good speeds, it is only one torrent getting "high" speeds (you can't call 15 kB/s "high speed", can you? I mean, it's not dial-up). Before, I had like one torrent with 8 kB/s, other with 5 kB/s, and so on, and they kept changing speeds, the one with 2 kB/s getting increased and you seeing it with sudden 6.5 kB/s, but the global speed was always about the same. Now not only the global speed keeps either down or changing like crazy, I got some torrents with massacrated speeds and one "shining out", either in upload or download (I've noticed having torrents for both speeds is rare).

I've been for the last ten or fifteen minutes trying the killer settings you told me before. Once again, I see no change in speeds (maybe they got a bit decreased, I said maybe).

I understand less each time.

I see dead users... ^^

New edit:

I found out something. My ISP is so nice. It now breaks the bittorrent protocol encription. Don't ask me how they do it; that beats me. Apparently the only way to escape its fury is through SSH tunneling. The thing is, I tried very hard to tunnel using Putty and some free services, just to test the results, and did not manage. I'm going to keep trying, wait for a new encription protocol to be developed and force it, or else find a way to change ISP (I'm currently binded to them because of the extremely limited home budget - they're currently the cheapest, and now I see why...). Now everything makes more sense.

Thanks for your attention.

[nkdy]

what a wonderfull story victor, i read your post...like i'm reading a story book...each word each sentences, i can imaging its in my mind....what a wonderful story...