Extremely slow DL *and* UL speeds with a particular torrent

[gglibertine]

I've generally had no problems with either download or upload speeds, everything moves nice and fast, but there's one particular torrent that's giving me a problem.

This torrent has only one seed 99% of the time, and usually three or four clients in the swarm, but I can't get a download speed better than 1.2kbps for it (it fluctuates between there and zero constantly). There are others in the swarm who have much less of the torrent than I do (I'm around 65% at the moment), but even when I'm connected to them, they're getting similarly sluggish speeds from me. This has been going on for weeks. I'd understand these speeds if there were 50 people downloading from the same seed, but there are never more than five in the swarm.

Every once in a while someone appears in the swarm who gets a reasonable upload speed from me for a few minutes, but it always slows back down; every once in a while a second seeder appears and I can get my download speed up to 8kbps or so (which is still pretty tragic for an 8GB file), but that never lasts more than a few minutes before the second seed falls offline again.

All this behavior is exactly the same whether or not I have any other torrents active. It's been my only active torrent for days now, with no improvement in transfer speeds.

I repeat, I have absolutely no problem with any other torrent -- it's only this particular one that's giving me trouble. I doubt there's anything I can do on my end to solve the problem, but I'm very curious about what might cause this kind of issue.

[Switeck]

If the seeder and all the peers you regularly connect to have lowered their upload speed to 1 KiloBYTE/sec for that torrent...yeah, that's the speed you can expect.

But why your UPLOAD speed is equally slow on that same torrent...especially to other peers which have far less...seems to be a hostile ISP at work. Maybe not your ISP, but those who you're uploading to!

Is there any rhyme or reason to the ips you're connect to? All on the same ISP or all in Asia for instance?

[jewelisheaven]

I swore I replied to this earlier...

As to what causes this? Improperly setup clients... Overloaded clients... ISPs who dislike high-bandwidth applications... Piece availability... Internet congestion...

As far as the ultimate cause, I'm thinking Switeck pretty much explained it best-as-possible. There is nothing you can do besides making sure when there are peers connected you are uploading at a reasonable rate to them.

[gglibertine]

Actually, the IPs I'm slow to *are* always in Asia, now that you mention it. (I'm DL'ing Asian TV.) Usually I don't have a problem with that, but on this particular torrent I'm noticing that when someone does get a decent upload they're not in Asia; the slow seed is in Hong Kong and the slow uploaders are in Malaysia and Taiwan.