Upload only if Unlimited

[Damoota]

If I try to throttle my upload to anything other than unlimited it just drops to less than half a K, even it it's right up at 60000 it still goes to nothing. At 25K, which is basically my real limit (NTL/Virgin 2Mb package) down she goes - 10K limit, still nothing. All the people I'm uploading to drop off and I'm left with no upload.

I've done all the good things, know my speed settings, of course I'm connectable. I've tried it with the router, taken the router away, tried really reducing my number of connections and upload slots, disabled all the resolving, DHT is off. And this happens if I use 1.6.1 or 1.7.5 which are the only two versions I've tried.

My computer is an Athlon XP 2800+. I know the dual core 64s have problems, but wonder if XPs do, too. I'm running on Windows XP.

So the lowdown is Upload limit unlimited = fantastic, anything but unlimited = horror.

[Ultima]

O.o

So you've tried selecting xx/256k or even xx/192k in the Speed Guide?

[Damoota]

Yup. I've worked my way through a spectrum of them, but it still doesn nothing to solve it. I have it on 192 by default.

I'm almost tempted to make a little video of what happens. I have it going along nicely, uploading about 23KB a sec, hit the upload limit to 25 and the upload just falls away in an arc like someone's used an ice-cream scoop on my upload bandwidth. Then no matter what I set it to it doesn't come back unless I go to unlimited. I've downloaded new copies of utorrent to make sure I haven't had some sort of corruption. Everything that you'd normally do I've done.

[Ultima]

Odd... Um, exit µTorrent. In %appdata%\uTorrent, try renaming settings.dat to settings.dat_ and delete settings.dat.old. Reopen/reconfigure everything in µTorrent; does the problem persist?

[Switeck]

Have you tried Ultima's Troubleshooting Guide?:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=15992

[Damoota]

Tried all that - here's what happens - going along nicely, then I hit it with a 20K limit - note the red bars where I first turn it on, then off.

After a while notice that the incoming connections icon has changed to the yellow triangle.

Then after a while it recovers, you can just see the red line at the bottom from the image above on the left.

Bonkers, no? If I click the connection icon the test port script says that it's still open and working fine.

[kurahashi]

Hm, and I can't remember what is the meaning of this 220k value in brackets :|

Do you have download limit turned on?

[Damoota]

Yes, that is the download limit - but changing it has absolutely no effect on the upload issue.

[kurahashi]

Turning it off (that is: setting it to zero) too?

As far as I can remember download limit was (and still is) bugged and turning it on can produce some strange results...

[jewelisheaven]

And the situation does not reset itself without you setting, then un-setting the max upload?

Period boom-and-bust cycles of uploading to peers is not uncommon. Especially in instances with only one torrent / one upload slot per torrent. Have you tried the < 90% usage box under Ctrl-P BitTorrent?

Also as I infer from the diagrams, this cycle lasts ~ 2 minutes? (the length of the graph when looking @ 1 sec. intervals)

[Damoota]

Tried the < 90% thing, no good. Tried the download at everything from infinite to nothing, no change.

It doesn't matter if I've got one person feeding from me, which I've limited it to on purpose, or if I've got six. As soon as I kick in the upload limit to anything but infinite then anyone connected to me will get their download go to nothing and then just drop off altogether. It's so irritating. I even put on Azureus to see if the same thing happened with that, but it doesn't, but I want to keep using utorrent as I like the interface more.

If I flick the limit to 25 on for say 2 seconds, then put it back then the upload will momentarily go to nothing, but the client will stay connected and I'll start uploading again - any longer than that and they'll disappear and then come back again a while later - this next image illustrates that.

You can see the grid is 10 seconds, and they were sucking about 14k a second from me when I kicked in a 25k limit.

EDIT: and just in case somebody hasn't seen it in the above post, I AM connectable, the yellow triangle comes on during the downtime in the middle. And again, even with the firewall disabled and a direct connection to my cable modem then it's the same, so that doesn't seem to be part of the problem - well I suppose that's already taken as red because of Azureus working, and all my port forwarding being correctly set up.

[jewelisheaven]

Sorry I misunderstood before. OK, so how long have you waited after imposing the limit to see if it comes back? Also have you checked your router logs to see if anything got triggered there? It's also possible the modem keeps logs of events (try the IP 192.168.100.1)

To help figure this out, may I suggest two programs from the respected sysinternals brand. TCPView, and Process Explorer. The former allows real-time graphical display of netstat and nbtstat commands available to windows CLI.

The latter is a debugging / power user tool for process and various additonal windows features. Both allow viewing of TCP/IP connections.

Regarding the new pic, it appears for whatever reason, the client disconnects for 1 minute exactly.

I'm not sure if this is a system-wide problem with the stable... as I always have my upload limit set. I will try it on a test instance and report back.

[Damoota]

I've left it on 25k for hours, well days in fact. I went away for a weekend and thought I'd get my ratio up on two television sites and a games site and when I got back thought why the hell have I uploaded next to nothing.

What happens is that I basically get tiny ripples in the upload speed graph that last a few seconds, and you'll see someone pop into the active window, it'll start to upload at maybe 0.3kB, and sometimes I'll get a stunning 4.5, but they'll only stay connected for a few seconds, then they're gone again. The incoming connections icon will change state now an again, but mostly stays yellow. I could take another screen grab as I've just has a nibble as I type this. It really does feel like trying to catch fish who show some interest, but then realise they don't fancy your bait when they get up close. The image would probably be of no real use, though, but I'd be happy to provide whatever it takes.

I'll download those tools tomorrow, cheers. Router logs say nothing related, just some get throwing things at UDP port 1026 every few minutes, and the modem logs are sparse, basically the last entry saying I had DCHP renewal a few hours ago. It's a Ambit ETH/USB Combo Cable Modem, standard NTL issue.

Thanks again.

[jewelisheaven]

Well in that case it sounds like your ISP is interfering with seeding....

Have you checked azureuswiki for your ISP ?

I can tell you I get those annoying UDP 1026-1028 everyone couple hours on my router...

Also it may be your ISP is using a similar method to Comcast in the USA regarting inserting packets with the RST (reset) flag set, to keep clients from connecting to eachother.

[Damoota]

I've checked Azureus and NTL/Virgin Media don't traffic shape torrents. All they do is knock your download to half speed for 4 hours if you download over 350 meg between 4pm and midnight.

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_Kingdom

I sort of thought that it was ok because of me being to impose limits fine with Azureus. I'll run utorrent on my laptop and see if limiting works fine on it here, as I still think it could be a problem that's specific to my main computer - anybody else out there got an AN7 with an Athlon XP that things work ok on?