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Automatic bandwidth restriction


NiteShdw

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Programs become useless bloat when everyone gets to add an x KB (where "x" roughly follows Moore's Law) "pet rock" to it.

As others have said, although this SOUNDS like a useful feature, the people MOST likely to need it (those sharing an internet connection with others on the same router) will benefit little to none for it (due to µTorrent not being able to "see" what the other computers on the LAN are doing so it can throttle itself accordingly.) A QoS router on the other hand, which has more "awareness" of the overall LAN activity levels, can make much better judgement calls without invoking lots of problemistic almost a.i. coding. (See Kazuaki Shimazaki's post about how 2 people are 'competing' for bandwidth on a LAN...and how the throttle design would fail and flail miserably.)

The others that need better bandwidth management that can also gain benefit from it will need something more robust than an on-the-fly bandwidth throttler, as they often have no concept even of how fast their connection is -- or even if they do, they lack knowledge on why certain µTorrent settings (half-open limit or upload slots for instance) cause problems...and often make changes in the wrong direction when they have such problems.

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  • 1 month later...

I find it astounding how people here are against such a simple feature that costs next to nothing to do while giving out such benefits to the whole community.

The point is not that one can use a traffic shaper app along with uTorrent (and someone has to demonstrate me that this will work in a shared connection environment).

The point is that having this setting on by default will benefit everyone. Trying to prove that ping isn't related to connection health is moot; the fact is that on ADSL or cable (and that must account for 90% of the torrent clients) ping IS related to upload speed 99% of the cases. So it will work almost all the time for almost everyone. Like someone said, it's a win/win situation.

This "debate" so similar to how things went when RSS feed monitoring was suggested it's not even funny. Some hardcore "talibans" were dead against the feature. Yet it's been done and a lot of people is enjoying it.

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I find it astounding that you continue to make comments along the lines of "a simple feature that costs next to nothing", when it's already been proven that a) you're not a coder, and B) anyone who is a coder understands why this is not a simple or trivial feature to implement properly. :rolleyes:

You ask for somebody to demonstrate how traffic-shaping software can work in a shared connection environment, and yet that's exactly what you're asking for?!?! :rolleyes:

Fact is, if people want to shape their web traffic (not just bittorrent...), they would be far better served with either a QoS-hardware router (which are becoming more and more common, and hence cheap) than to have a half-baked QoS implementation put into uTorrent. And if they're not in a shared connection environment, they'd be better off using software specifically designed to do just that, rather than having an add-on to uTorrent which wouldn't do it properly anyway.

And besides, nobody has actually said it shouldn't be implemented in uTorrent - most people have just recommended that there's better solutions out there already, particularly given the fact that there are (literally) hundreds of outstanding bittorrent-specific feature requests which would make the client much better without Ludde needing to disappear off up a QoS cul-de-sac for 2 months...

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I'm not the same person you replied before in this thread, and I am indeed a developer, and I don't see how difficult it could be to spawn a thread that would wait for a ping & act up on the upload / download speed limits.

So, it gets better. Instead of buying a license for an additional program that would locally shape my traffic (you imply here that on a shared connection env, it wouldn't work - and I agree with that) I should now upgrade my router.

sigh.

I have NO problem with the fact that this request should wait in a list of to-be-implemented feature. My problem is that people on this thread thinks that because it doesn't apply to them for whichever reason, it's not supposed to be even talked about (and if you read this thread from the start, you will see that people did say this feature shouldn't make its way in uTorrent).

I stand behind what's been said all over: having an autospeed feature enabled by default instead of installing uTorrent with unlimited upload bandwidth *will* be a positive thing for everyone. Until then, I won't go away from AZ even though it's bloated, slow, resource hungry, etc, etc.

You can tell me that you don't care that I use AZ instead of uTorrent, yet I believe the point of offering an application like uTorrent is to actually replace bloated software. And from what I saw on the forums, I must not be the only one thinking that way.

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If you're a developer, you should be able to see why this feature isn't appropriate for uTorrent. It smacks of 'feature creep' big-time. And if you're really happy to use Az because it has a half-baked solution to traffic-shaping, good for you. I use cFos because it shapes all my traffic, not just BT, which means that if I'm remotely connected into my box, surfing the web, downloading emails whilst somebody uploads to my ftp server and uTorrent hammers away downloading and uploading, everything works smoothly and responsively, without any lags or delays. Your suggested solution would mean that uTorrent would not use the max bandwidth available, nor would I be guaranteed a smooth and lag-free web experience - the 'worst of both worlds', so-to-speak.

If you aren't prepared to spend €9 (what, £5?) on a copy of cFos, then use uTorrent to find a copy for free. It works - period. Whereas automatic bandwidth allocation in uTorrent would not be good for me, as it'd mean wasted bandwidth because it would never work efficiently. So I'll vote a +1 for it, as long as it has an 'off' switch. ;)

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  • 1 month later...

I can't believe this feature isn't being considered. It may be hard to imagine when you spend half the day managing downloads on a dedicated connection for bittorrent, but this would be a huge benefit for many users. You can call it "arbitrary and unscientific", but that doesn't change the fact that it works, and it works a lot better than many things that aren't "arbitrary and unscientific". Azureus' implementation allows me and other on the network to continue using the internet while often allowing upload speed that are higher than the limit I would set when I know I'm the only one using the internet.

Webreaper's ideas about managing the traffic for the whole network are beside the point; anyone who demands that doesn't know what they're talking about. All I want is to download torrents without practically disabling my internet connection. I like having a minimum upload speed so I can't be shut out completely, but even without that it would really help. This makes a lot more sense than the default (with the wrong limit) of the program uploading so much that even it can't download. Unlike many people who want to download torrents I know how to find a good upload limit when no one else is home, but when someone else is playing a game I don't want to keep making adjustments and checking if it's ok with them.

This is not definitely not feature creep. Managing the upload speed is a feature that you wouldn't think of releasing utorrent without, so it only makes sense to enhance it so the user doesn't have to keep adjusting it as network conditions change. If that's too much, why not have people download (or buy) another program to do a hash check on the downloaded data? The upload limit scheduler is probably far more complicated, and would be practically obsolete is this was implemented.

If you already know how to write network code, pinging a host and incrementing or decrementing the upload limit really isn't that hard - we should be talking about days, not "two months". I hate having to keep azureus around for a feature this small that it even implemented twice. Is everyone here so obsessed with not copying Azureus that they'll ignore a great idea?

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  • 4 weeks later...

Well Krogoth ... we can keep pushing, and they will keep pushing back.

I believe some people here are dead-set *against* that feature because they locked themselves in the idea it's not how it should be done.

Of course it would benefit everyone, and of course it's very easy to do. Yet it will never be done because it's not deemed "important".

<sigh>. I'm just like you, I have to keep on using AZ.

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Ever since the dawn of bittorrent, azureus has been the only program I have used. No special reason, it was just the first program I was shown, I liked it, and stuck with it. However, during my recent reinstallation-of-everything routine, I decided to give utorrent a whirl because I heard good things about it, and lately azureus has been feeling very bloated and memory-hoggish.

I LOVE THIS PROGRAM!! But sadly, the only reason I found this forum and thread was because I googled utorrent auto speed. It is very simple to set up and use, and does exactly what you want it to. Not everyone wants to download a seperate program to control all their traffic, regardless if it is better for them in the long run.

The funny thing is, I don't even want it to control traffic for myself. The very reason I found the autospeed plugin for Az a couple years ago was for the OTHER people on my dsl line. Me being the download freak that I am, my comp was constantly tapping out the line, and when another computer tried doing anything they had very slow response times. Well this way if they start doing things on the internet, bandwidth starts going to their comp, my comps ping goes up, it throttles both uploads and downloads (I had my download speed set to 3x my upload speed), and others are free to download and surf without me worrying about my comp. I really don't see another way of achieving this on my trustly old 2wire router. cfos sounds like it is intended to control the traffic of the computer its on, unless it acts as a router.

Sure its rather crude, and definately not perfect. Which is exactly what makes it so great. If I wanted perfect traffic control I would take the time to set up a seperate program like cfos. I am surprised to see so much fighting over a feature like this. This isn't a complex algorithm that will add boatloads of code, simply set up a ping every couple minutes. if ping time is above the desired setting (i set mine to 150ms, which was default) then restrict the upload by 3k (in turn restricting the download speed by 9k, or not at all, depending on settings). Rinse and repeat.

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  • 1 month later...

Another long time user here who found this page solely by googling for how to automatically set the upload limit based on network speed.

++ing this feature for consideration. I find it somewhat surprising that uTorrent doesn't have this feature :(

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  • 1 month later...

I'm another user who's been using uTorrent for quite some time and I've been waiting for the addition of an auto speed-like feature so that I can recommend uTorrent over Azureus to friends who aren't so technically savvy. Auto speed may not be perfect but it just works. New users can leave upload settings alone without having to determine a max upload that won't choke the connection.

Take a look at the 600 lines of code in the auto speed source. It's not that compex. If you want to appeal to a more broad user base, this option must be installed. Tech savvy users who want a lean and complete torrent solution will continue to use uTorrent. I would wager, though, that many of them don't even know about using cFosSpeed to prioritize traffic. I didn't. I just found out by reading this thread (which I only arrived at by Googling "uTorrent auto speed" like everyone else). Now that I've researched cFosSpeed, I understand that it's a much better solution than a simple auto speed via google ping. That's irrelevant. Newbies don't need that complex and complete tcp/ip traffic prioritization and won't pay for it. They don't know how to determine a proper max upload speed and they would rather not learn if given the choice. Azureus gives them that choice.

I understand that a goal of the uTorrent project is to remain as bloatware-free as possible. If you wish to remain a niche product that only minimalists and the elite run, don't add this feature. If you wish to spread uTorrent to the masses, add it.

Either way, I'll still run and love uTorrent (and now cFosSpeed as well).

Thanks for making a great program, and I look forward to future releases.

- altair

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It's already spread to the masses. We've got literally millions of users (many of them complete newbies). So that point is moot.

Anyway, automatic upload cap functionality is actually going to be implemented, but NOT the way the Az plugin does it (which is worthless). It'll be done more like the TCP congestion protocol, for faster and much more accurate control.

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i'm thinking of making my own program to do the AutoSpeed feature, but i need someone to explain the exact procedure that AutoSpeed uses. (i.e. at what rate pings are sent, at what ping delay do you lower the upload limit and how much you lower it, etc...)

any help is much appreciated...

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WebSurfer80, those are parameters that you can experiment with to get the best results. Azureus actually has settings for the minimum and maximum pings, and the size of the adjustments. For the delay, just make a guess and see how it works out - obviously if you make a small adjustment every minute it will be slow to respond, but it doesn't have to be done every second either.

To everyone who brings up cFosSpeed, keep in mind that some people don't control the whole network; the reason I would like to see autospeed is so I can maximize my upload and let torrents seed to a 1.0 ratio regardless of what's happening on other computers. Even if I could control the whole network, playing with that kind of stuff isn't something I want to do without getting paid.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have read through this thread, and am honestly in stitches about it. I see 2 solutions to this problem, for it IS a problem, and it really, honestly, truly DOES need a solution, because the VAST majority of bittorrentors are fairly noobish to the whole upload-and-what-it-should-be, so either have it too high, hurting themselves, or, more often, far too low hurting the torrent as a whole. Sure, theres many other, better, solutions - but remember the target audience here.

1. Cutting the pissing competition, it's not that damn hard to code a tick box, tracert to the first non class C IP, then if it's above a set amount decrease the UL, if it's below increase. Code so that scheduler overrides. I've seen the plugin, not the default built in - the the extra plugin for Az, it's really not that big. Besides, it could be done in no time if someone really knew what they were doing; I do harder projects in PHP/MySQL every single day for a living.

It's not even as if you would HAVE to code all the ping and trace route yourself -- thats what ripping data from a command line output is for.

2. A better, yet exponentially harder job would be to add plugin support. And before I get 3.7 million responses about why thats not necessary, it would mean a easy answer to all feature requests involving a "Comon, it wouldn't be that hard" "Fine, heres the plugin SDK, you do it". Something deeply satisfying about that.

Meh w/e. I like uT (especially the rumors about internal counters on UL and DL, and (one would assume) priority for good seeders), but without such a basic feature it's not worth jack to me. I leave my torrents 24/7, shared network, sometimes others have webcams running, which lag up with the torrents running, even with QoS on a gaming router. Not to mention other P2P.

It's not like the code would take up any decent amount, compared to other, far more useless features, such as the vewy pweety download graphs, or the "restrict access to the following ip's" - with one little line and no ip range support, thats no good for proper restriction - if you actually look in peer guardian or the like there literally millions of IPs - over half of all possible - set as being restricted.

In the end the only decent argument against so far has been "We couldn't be assed".

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