What speed should I even be expecting to begin with?

[camerontayler]

I've been spending hours messing around with settings (not frustrated or anything, just trying to maximize speed as much as possible like everyone else), and then I got to thinking...

...What is the top download speed I should even be shooting for?

Meaning, am I already there or not even close? I'm just not sure what I should be shooting for overall or expecting from my Internet connection assuming I have all of the "right" settings in uTorrent, my computer, my router, etc. 500 Kb/s? 2000 Kb/s? 5000 Kb/s?

In order for folks to better answer my question, I'm supposed to be on a 10Mb/s connection with AT&T Uverse, but here are my actual results from dslreports.com:

Dallas

Latency: 26ms

D: 5587 Kb/s

U: 906 Kb/s

New York

Latency: 45ms

D: 5436 Kb/s

U: 689 Kb/s

San Francisco

Latency: 43ms

D: 4641 Kb/s

U: 677 Kb/s

(And as a last point of reference to answer my own question about how far I have to go to get to nirvana, I get about 600 Kb/s total right now when I let uTorrent run at its max.)

Thanks in advance for any and all's answers!

[jewelisheaven]

That's about right. Remember the important settings are your upload. You should tick the Ctrl-G settings for xx/512 for starters, if you consistently upload that (Speed tab, scale for 5 or 30 second interval) you can try increasing it manually... but be advised the closer you are to choking your upload, the download will suffer.

If you get around 600 KiBps on http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ then yup you can assuredly download that fast as long as peers can UPLOAD that fast to you.

[camerontayler]

jewelisheaven--Thank you so much for responding! OK, I think I miscommunicated--that's my bad! My *download* max (for all files I'm downloading added together) is between 600-700 Kb/s. That is with my upload limit set to 72 Kb/s which is what uTorrent set it to when I did the Speed Guide and selected "xx/768k".

So, based on that new information and my speed reports from dslreports.com, what do you think are the top download speeds I should be shooting for? And if the answer is still around 600-700 Kb/s for download and around 72 Kb/s for upload as I am getting now, how come that is the highest I can achieve on both if dslreports.com says my maxes for each are so much higher and I'm not running any other network traffic at the same time?

(As a side note, I downloaded the Open Office file and the highest download speed I achieved downloading just that 1 file alone was 692 Kb/s.)

Thanks again in advance for your response! Certainly not looking for you to help me troubleshoot the problem as I know there are plenty of ideas/resources on here to help me try to do that. But just want to understand how much of a "problem" I have (if any) before I spend hours and hours (which I am prone to do) tweaking things to get to those maxes.

[jewelisheaven]

The reason ... ISPs are like hard drive manufacturers...

They measure in Kbps and all programs and ... technical people measure in KiBps (b vs B ... 8 (b)its are in 1 (B)yte

If you check out http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ you should be able to hit NEAR 5600/8 .. which is 700 KiBps theoretical maximum... 600 KiBps in uT or higher would be a near-perfectly downloading torrent. But note that if you are downloading at that speed your upload will possibly suffer due to i/o operations.

Do you have any more questions?

[camerontayler]

AHHHHH. Wow, that's great to hear that I'm actually getting download speeds very near my connection's theoretical max! Thanks for explaining that--I didn't know that at all.

Funny you should mention I/O operations...I actually just had one of my 750Gb Western Digital My Book drives fail on me last night. I have 2 750Gb drives and 2 1Tb drives--unfortunately the one that decided to die just *happened* to be the drive I use for storing all of my active torrents and active torrent data--ugh. It started giving me read/write errors when I tried to click on folders on the drive last night, I unplugged and re-plugged in the USB cable and restarted my computer to get it to re-recognize the drive, upon re-plugging in Vista asked if I wanted to "scan the drive for errors", I said yes, it started scanning and I let it run while I slept, I woke up this morning to find it stuck at 75%, I canceled the operation, and now I can't get Vista to recognize the drive at all when I plug it in.

Now, I'm totally NOT asking you for hard drive failure help/advice here (I've had drives fail on me before and know the huge mess I am in now to try to get the data recovered--and yes I know I should have backed it up, I was waiting for Memeo to finish backing up another drive before starting the back-up on the failed drive this weekend), but as it pertains to uTorrent I just thought I'd ask if you thought there was any chance that what I was doing with the drive might have caused it to fail in any way? I know trying to pinpoint that as the cause would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack and it's more likely to be failed hardware like a failed head or something--I'm more just curious if you thought downloading 100 torrents simultaneously totaling probably 200-300Gb and trying to keep up with writing all of those individual files/pieces at 5.6 Mb/s (fast, but certainly not crazy to expect from a hard drive) might be an issue? I had my cache set at 400Mb because I have 3Gb of RAM and was still getting "Drive Overload" issues at 200Mb on the cache, but maybe that is irrelevant. Anyways, enough of my babbling. Simply put, was I being too overzealous with the drive and I should be kinder to my future drives?

Thanks for all your info--you've been *more* than helpful! :-)

[Ultima]

Can you post a screenshot of your disk cache settings in Preferences > Advanced > Disk Cache?

[camerontayler]

Guys--Sorry about the 4-alarm fire! I just played around with the drive for the last hour, re-starting my computer, powering down the drive, and changing out the USB ports it was plugged in to and the drive just came back! Seems to be fine so far just missing a few files/folders that I added right before it started giving me error messages which is to be expected. Needless to say, I'm going to start backing it up right away. :-)

Ultima--But since you asked, I'm happy to oblige! Here's a screen shot below of my disk cache settings. I've got a 3.6Ghz P4 and 3Gbs of RAM running Vista Ultimate downloading 50-100 torrents simultaneously at the speeds described above and reading/writing from a 750Gb and a 1Tb Western Digital My Book external drives over USB 2.0. I tried to set all of my settings under "disk cache preferences" for the "if you have a lot of RAM" setting as suggested in the main uTorrent FAQ. Started out with my cache at 200Mb (can't remember for sure, but I think that's maybe what it defaulted to when I checked that option?), then raised it up to 400Mb when I was still getting "disk overloaded" messages and temporary speed decreases. Maybe 400Mb is way too high. (I did have my external drives running through a USB 2.0 powered hub because the cord length enabled me to get the 4 drives up on a book shelf and off of the ground away from the vacuum, etc., but I am reconsidering that now out of fear that the hub may be causing read/write speed reductions regardless of the fact that everything in the configuration is 2.0. Think I'll do a speed test with a large file now both through the hub and not through the hub and test that hypothesis.)

As my dad would say when I was growing up, you asked me what time it was and I told you how to build a watch. ;-) Thanks for all of your help guys--it's forum members/moderators like you guys that make running software like this enjoyable and not painful.

[Ultima]

Hm, your disk cache settings look mostly fine... Try playing around with "Reduce memory usage when the cache is not needed" to see if disabling it improves the "disk overload" situation at least a bit.

[camerontayler]

Sweet--I'll try that. Thanks again!!! You guys respond FAST.

[Ultima]

You might still want to take note that even though USB 2.0's theoretical maximum throughput is 60MiB/s, USB 2.0 devices never actually go that fast (often hitting only a 1/10th or even only a 1/20th of that amount). The fact that you're using USB (2.0 or not) might be the real bottleneck.

[camerontayler]

Ultima--

Good to know about the theoretical speeds of USB versus actual speeds. Unfortunately, the 4 drives in my possession are USB 2.0 only and an $800ish or so investment so have to just be happy with them. :-) But knowing what you've just said, maybe in the future I'll consider getting the same drive in the network/ethernet option which would be able to do 100Mb/s if I understand correctly.

All--

On a side note, if anyone is interested, I ran that USB hub speed test I was talking about earlier in this post and here are the results below. The test methodology wasn't super scientific, but interesting nonetheless. I basically just took a huge file and copied it to two external drives alone and then at once so as to try to isolate CPU processing power from USB congestion. Looks like running my external hard drives through the hub instead of connecting them directly to the computer was causing some slowdown:

Direct USB Connection to Computer

- Drive 1: 10.5 Mb/s

- Drive 2: 10.1 Mb.s

Connecting Drives through USB Hub to Computer

- Drive 1: 9.5 Mb/s

- Drive 2: 8.8 Mb/s

So there was a decrease in speed. What was more interesting to me, though, was when connected directly to the computer, the copying processes would maintain those speeds listed above the entire time until the file completed. When connected through the hub, however, the speeds above were the max speeds reached and then both of the active copy processes started to perpetually slow down. It wasn't a huge amount, but it would lose like 0.1 Mb/s every 30-60 seconds and it wouldn't stop slowing down. It was interesting to see that because I have had situations when the drives were running through the hub where I would start 10-15 huge copy processes before going to bed and come back in the morning only to find that 2-4 of them were still running and had slowed to an extremely low speed (almost standstill). I would then have to cancel the copy and then either restart it from scratch or--more often due to the huge sizes of the folders--just eyeball the folder to find out which folders/files hadn't copied and re-copy those.

I know that's all totally off subject for this thread which started off talking about download speeds and then moved to disk caching, but I thought someone else out there might be interested in seeing the USB comparison data. I've now re-connected my hard drives directly to the computer (despite the cables not being long enough) and just have peripherals (Blackberry, web cam, digital camera, etc.) connected through the hub.

[Ultima]

Unreliable hub

Regarding the ethernet option you speak of: 100Mbps ethernet (which translates to 12.5MiB/s max) actually has a lower theoretical max speed than USB 2.0, which has 480Mbps theoretical max (which translates to 60MiB/s).

I've never heard of hard drives being offered with ethernet connections, but if you can find one that is 1Gbps, that'd be better (it would have a theoretical max of 125MiB/s). Better yet, if your motherboard has the connections, eSATA would be a fine option.

[camerontayler]

That wouldn't surprise me. I've had a lot of problems with Belkin hubs (this same hub causes my OS to freeze on startup and it is a known incompatibility with Belkin) so it wouldn't surprise me if the hub was unreliable on other fronts as well.

Here is a link to the ethernet version of the drive I have:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WDG2NC10000N-Ethernet-External/dp/B000NKJ2X8/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1199983702&sr=8-1

It looks like it is 1Gbps. So based on theoretical speeds, do you think that the throughput speeds would be faster reading/writing to ethernet storage drives into a 1Gbps ethernet hub than connecting USB 2.0 drives directly to the computer (not through a hub)?

Interested as I am about to buy 2 more external drives taking my total to 6 and a) I obviously want to maximize throughput, and 2) I am running out of USB 2.0 ports on my computer. :-)

[Switeck]

Have you run out of internal drive bays?

You may want to look at SATA drives...with a long enough cable they can be external too.

[Ultima]

Ethernet is generally much more reliable than USB in terms of speed and stability, so yes, I would expect better performance with those types of drives. In the end, eSATA and SATA are still better alternatives. Just a note... even though the connection interface's theoretical throughput rates may be higher, you still need to take into account the fact that the drive's technical limitations (seeking and such) might still not allow you to download/upload as quickly as you might want.