Why Four Peaks Per Hour?

[abrogard]

My downloads are really slow. I only expect a max of about 50kB/s but they recently have often been running at things like 0.1 kB/s.

Looking at the speed log I notice something strange - there seems to a regular pattern of four peaks every hour.

You'll notice that a few hours ago it was almost never above about 4kB/s

Then about 4 hours ago - which would have been about 10pm Zulutime (GreenwichMeantime or whatever) - it suddenly broke that barrier and stayed above until now (when the file is finally complete).

At the low speed time the uploads were actually doing better than the downloads.

Upload or download, slow speeds or better speeds, there's still four peaks per hour. The peaks coincide.

This coincidence seems to me to indicate that the problem has nothing to do with the speeds of the suppliers of the file nor the receivers of my output.

The variation seems to me to indicate there's nothing wrong with my setup - it is capable of running quite well at good speeds, it doesn't need any tweaking.

I find it hard to imagine my ISP would be doing this.

Has anyone any ideas on what might be causing it?

regards,

ab

[funchords]

Traffic shaping is my first suspicion. Who is the ISP and what are the parameters of your connection?

[HGBEERAG]

hmm... i agree with funchords

all of the throttling ive heard of ONLY TAKES PLACE UNTIL midnight ish, then lets torrents go wild. I personally save all my torrents to an auto load file and have Windows Scheduler open uttorrent at midnight. Works like a charm...

[abrogard]

I'm with aanet - aanet.com.au - and they have previously claimed to me that they don't control their clients traffic in any way at all. I'll query them again, send the graph to them.

My account is 512/128 only, which is why I never expect any great speeds, with a 10gig download/month and NO shaping after that, instead I pay dollars for every gig after 10gig.

I would have expected shaping to simply limit the speed. So that the graph would show a straight line. Whats with the peaks?

[Switeck]

Try lowering your upload max till upload at least runs steady.

[abrogard]

You mean in options/connection max upload bandwidth? It was set at 9. I've changed it to 4. I'll have to find another file to download to test it. Might take a while. I have to switch utorrent off if i want to use the computer on the web, which I do today, because utorrent makes it crawl on all web related stuff.

Have you any idea what is the mechanism here? what's going on? It's kinda like a buffer filling and emptying to me. But there's no sharp cutoff. It rises gradually and falls gradually. Relatively speaking. It doesn't drop like a square wave drops.

p.s. My ISP responded with a message about I'm using P2P, dependent upon other machines speeds, etc., etc., please go here for a better speed test......

Totally useless and misses-the-point and fails to address the issue rubbish. Bodes ill for the future. Usually when I find myself stuck with such a dumb respondent I can never get past them...

[Switeck]

Ah, there's the likely problem!:

"I have to switch utorrent off if i want to use the computer on the web, which I do today, because utorrent makes it crawl on all web related stuff."

Your networking hardware and/or software is half-crapping out on you while running µTorrent...and causing the weird peaks as a result.

Have you tried Ultima's Troubleshooting Guide?:

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