This torrent used to have such wonderful speeds T.T

[sooojaded]

I'm downloading a torrent, which used to have a wonderful speed (at least to me). The speed used to be around 40KB/s for a few days after I downloaded that torrent. But now the speed is

My icon is green, as always.My ISP isn't listed, I enabled Protocol Encryption. I paused all other torrents to download just that one. And yes, I have followed Ultima's Speed Guide. So I tested the OpenOffice torrent. And it downloaded at the same wonderful speed that I used to have.

(If any of them run quickly, then the problems you're experiencing likely lie only with the swarm)

So...is there anything I can do about this?

Help T.T I don't wish to wait for another week before the download finishes...

[jewelisheaven]

Well, first I would say you are likely to be overloading your connection with 50+ per torrent.

What is your settings for Ctrl-G? If you're under xx/1Mbit, definitely.

As long as nothing changed, it is possible for you to download at the speeds the OpenOffice demonstrated. But you need to make sure you are uploading fairly, and when it's time, the peers who have BIG upload will send to you.

I just double-checked your picture... If you are uploading at that rate with < 3 connected slots, you should be downloading at maximum as I consider 10 KiBps stream "platinum" speed. (Some on the forum say that up to 8 slots on 30 KiBps upload is still fair)

I would STILL recommend lowering concurrent clients. If you want you can change the Ctrl-P ->peer.disconnect_inactive_interval to 300.

[sooojaded]

Hi jewelisheaven, it seems that you're helping out a lot of people in this forum. Thanks for helping out! My settings for Ctrl G are:

I also chose use additional upload slots if ul speed <90%. I have always been uploading at near max speed, that is, 35~40KB/s.

The weird part is, after sometime, the speed increases to ~25KB/s, then decreases to a painfully slow speed.

In order to stop overloading, do I stop all other torrents instead of pausing them? Is that what you mean?

peer.disconnect_inactive_interval is already at 300...

Once again, thanks...

[jewelisheaven]

Thanks Yeah, I help people when I haven't been watching a TV show non-stop for HOURS (woo time off) and my brain is fried. Concurrent connections is the Global and Per Torrent setting you see there.

I would change those to something lower like 20 per torrent and 100 global (Ctrl-P -> BitTorrent).

For the torrent you are noticing spurts of speed... Check the availability under General tab. Are you equal OR higher than the other clients you are connected to under Peers tab?

I would let it run with new lower client settings and see how you like it.

Edit: Link c/o kurahashi

[sooojaded]

Changed the Concurrent Connections thingy to those you have suggested.

The Availability is above 1, right now its 3.9999, sometimes as high as 14.9999

Sometimes, the peer speed is higher than mine, sometimes lower. It's not very consistent.

Read the thread by kurahashi. setting the max ul speed to 35KB/s, which gives me a less stable upload speed, actually gives me a better download speed (~25KB/s as of now). setting max ul speed to 22KB/s, gives me a more stable upload speed, actually decreases my download speed to about the same as the ul speed (21KB/s). Weird...Should I go with the slower ul speed anyway? During the time when I set the Ctrl-G to xx/384, I could get very good download speeds (~40KB/s), even with unstable upload speeds.

[jewelisheaven]

Well I think I messed up on the link, try the other link in his signature. I'm trying to make sure you are on a non-restricted, bottlenecked swarm. Periodic bursts of speed when you are on a bottlenecked swarm means there are few seeds (of which this does not appear to be the case) and therefore you only get data when other peers send it to you.

As far as your observed speeds, if you can sustain that reliably (your ISP / modem doesn't disconnect the internet) then by all means. I have a problem since I'm on an ISP which injects RST packets, that I can only use 1/2 of my available upload without being reset every 2 minutes. At least at 50% I only get hit once every 10 minutes or so.

The reason you should be wary of increasing your upload too much is that, once you hit the upload cap, you are choking the connection. This means that download requests or ACKs won't get processed, which effectively halts your downloading peak. So it's a fine line Feel free to experiment and watch the different scales on the Speed tab. I know I have a good swarm when I can see a straight upload line hovering around my upload and a download which is ~ 5-8x greater.

[sooojaded]

Hi, After inspection for several days, I realised that my dl speed is most dependent on the swarm than any settings.

Certain peers that I connect to give me REALLY great speeds.

For example:

However, after a certain amount of time, the connection will timeout, and I get really sucky speeds like these:

My question is, is there a way to "grab-hold" of these peers, so that I can dl and ul at a good rate? What I have been doing is right click inside the Peers tab and choose "add peer..." then copy and paste the IP of the peer that gives me good speeds. It does connect to the particular peer (if his client is on, and when he isn't on the peer list already), but does not actively upload or download from that particular peer. It seems to be determined by the client itself, which periodically, allows me to dl and ul from the peer at the same great speed, but it looks like I can't have much say in it

Btw, I have brothers who are currently sharing an internet connection with me. We are on a LAN, and we are all connected by the same router. My brothers had complained that while I'm downloading by torrenting, they face serious lag in their Dota games. What they say is most likely to be true, because they no longer face the lag when I stopped all torrenting activity. Is there any way I can continue downloading without compromising their games? It might be because I'm squandering their bandwidth. Does that mean I have to turn off DHT, lower global no. of connections and connections per torrent?

[jewelisheaven]

That's a good start Primarily it is the concurrent connections and active communication. That coupled with the bandwidth / time sensitive nature for their gaming means you should also think about / test their game play with you limiting your connections to 1/2 or 1/3 of their current settings and limiting the upload by about 5-10% more at a time until they stop experiencing lag. It's mainly a work-as-you-go solution.

As far as your setup.. you are already configured well if you can download synchronously ~ .125 Mbit IMNSHO

[Switeck]

Turn off lots of µTorrent's extra features to reduce lag.

I mean DHT, Resolve IPs, Local Peer Discovery, UPnP, and high half open connection rates.

Next, just like already suggested...if your upload speed limit is not being reached and sustained then your connection is probably overloaded just by that. So you'll need to lower upload speed to probably no more than 30 KiloBYTES/sec...maybe even as low as 20 KiloBYTES/sec. (This is assuming you really have 384 kilobits/sec max upload bandwidth...sounds like you really have only about 320.)

It seems your ip resolves to [something].pacific.net.sg -- is that Singapore?

Because everything I've read suggests there's massive crippling of BitTorrent traffic by every ISP in that area.

There may even be a general line crippling applied every time BitTorrent traffic is sensed by your ISP.

Have you experimented with the encryption settings in µTorrent?

[sooojaded]

That's a good start Primarily it is the concurrent connections and active communication. That coupled with the bandwidth / time sensitive nature for their gaming means you should also think about / test their game play with you limiting your connections to 1/2 or 1/3 of their current settings and limiting the upload by about 5-10% more at a time until they stop experiencing lag. It's mainly a work-as-you-go solution.

Will try that (once they starting Dotaing). 1/2 or 1/3 of current settings --> 100 global 20-40 per torrent? My downloads are reaching 90++%. Yay! Less fights between us once they complete.

Turn off lots of µTorrent's extra features to reduce lag.

I mean DHT, Resolve IPs, Local Peer Discovery, UPnP, and high half open connection rates.

Does Half-open connection rates refer to net.max_halfopen? I changed it from 8 to 4.

Have you experimented with the encryption settings in µTorrent?

Besides enabling Protocol Encryption and setting peer.lazy_bitfield to true, are there any other encryption settings?

As far as your setup.. you are already configured well if you can download synchronously ~ .125 Mbit IMNSHO

It seems your ip resolves to [something].pacific.net.sg -- is that Singapore?

Because everything I've read suggests there's massive crippling of BitTorrent traffic by every ISP in that area.

There may even be a general line crippling applied every time BitTorrent traffic is sensed by your ISP.

Really...I must have complained too much. Thanks for your help! Maybe 40KBYTES/s is a dream come true, at least in uTorrent? Or I'm just too lucky if I had that speed. If my ISP throttles BitTorrent traffic, is it the reason why I get good speeds from certain peers only, and only at certain times of the day (speeds increase after office hours)? Is that also why I could dl from websites at 50-70KB/s but not in uTorrent? Wow...and how did u know my ISP is Pacific Internet Limited, Singapore? I have only 3 ISPs in my area. Just curious, where did you get to read that they all throttle BitTorrent traffic? This link given by Firon seems to list only 1 ISP, which is not my ISP.

Thanks guys, and sorry for over-quoting. Btw, my speeds seem to have improved a little after disabling some features Switeck suggested. I hope it stays that way

[Switeck]

"Does Half-open connection rates refer to net.max_halfopen? I changed it from 8 to 4."

Yes, net.max_halfopen sets µTorrent's half open connection limit...how many new connections µTorrent tries at once. If you're not firewalled, incoming connections (via Peer Exchange) do NOT count against that limit...so you could end up with a LOT more connections than you might think in a couple minutes even with the half open set to 1. If you're firewalled, you won't get any incoming connections...so a higher half open limit may be desirable, but you'll be hard-pressed to find many unfirewalled peers+seeds to connect to.

Practically every ISP in Singapore (and Thailand!) goes through the state-run internet trunk lines...and they all seem to throttle. Even a few Australian ISPs fall victim to the long-distance throttling because their internet access often passes through the same internet trunk lines as well!

If you can find local peers/seeds on the same ISP as you...or at least in Singapore, you might get high(er) speeds. That much is purely hit-or-miss, though downloading/uploading torrents that are popular in that area certainly increases those odds. (Obscure Italian films probably wouldn't have many...)

Moderators and system administrators of this message forum can see posters' ip addresses. Helps to know who we're banning if it comes to that, but for me it's even more helpful in ruling out ISP interference. ...or rather determining if that's a factor, since so many ISPs DO throttle or interfere with BitTorrent that even the ones that people say don't...often do at least in small degrees or in high-congestion areas.

Crazy as it might sound, sometimes too much encryption actually cuts speeds...depending on how the ISP detects and throttles. Rogers Cable in Canada for instance throttles "unknown" encrypted traffic pretty hard...but lets something like 20 KiloBYTES/sec download speeds for unencrypted BitTorrent traffic regardless of what else is going on...so it's best on them to get both encrypted and unencrypted. Others tend to kill or throttle almost everything on your BitTorrent listening port, but often miss outgoing connections which are often on a random port from ~1000 to 5000. Some, like ComCast and Cox, only start killing BitTorrent connections if they sense seeding. I'm on ComCast, so I'm painfully familiar with that...though it's not a complete blockage, as they often miss outgoing encrypted connections. But that requires the peers in the same torrent swarm as me to both be unfirewalled AND running with encryption enabled (or at least allowed for incoming connections).

Azureus WIKI has a couple webpages devoted to both which ISPs block/throttle/mangle BitTorrent traffic and ways to at least partially defeat it. Maybe you can find even better results using it. Just be warned...if you do TOO well, your ISP will find other ways to torture you! 1 month of you downloading+uploading over 100 GB of bandwidth tends to draw a LOT of unwanted ISP attention to yourself, especially if they think they're successfully preventing people from doing that.

[sooojaded]

Sounds like the start of World War 3. The BT clients vs the ISPs where one tries to outsmart the other.

If you can find local peers/seeds on the same ISP as you...or at least in Singapore, you might get high(er) speeds. That much is purely hit-or-miss, though downloading/uploading torrents that are popular in that area certainly increases those odds. (Obscure Italian films probably wouldn't have many...)

Obscure Italian films indeed. Hm, anyway the peers that I connect to which seems to have a high affinity with me in terms of speed, tend to be from Japan/USA according to their IP resolves. They definitely do not have the same ISP as me. There is only one Singapore peer in the swarm which has different ISP (SingTel, from ip resolving) from mine, which I connect to occasionally, and the speeds are actually slower than Japanese/American counterparts. It's pretty weird.

P.S. Thanks for your (very) elaborate answer. Now I understand many of the terms and options that affect speed better (even if they're all over the forum)

[Switeck]

BTW, check in the Peers window...if you're downloading or uploading to an ip quickly, do you see an "E" in the flags column? That means encrypted connection...if there's no "I" flag, then they're outgoing connections as well. (Those are the ones I deem most likely to bypass typical ISP throttling of BitTorrent.)