A question as to why I can alternate between 300 kB/s and 50 kB/s

[BinaryPandaBear]

This gist is this: When I limit my download speed to 1 kB/s and let the actual download speed reach that, soon as I remove that restriction a torrent will jump to somewhere between 200 - 400.

So is there some sort of restriction on me, maybe because I haven't got my Up/Down ratio up yet? Or maybe there's something more sinister at work here?

Any thoughts, explainations would be great. Or if this is just simply the way it is, any thoughts on how to exploit this are also welcome .

Thanks in advance, BPB

[hermanm]

Maybe you didn't proof your post, but you said, "When I limit my download speed to 1 kB/s". You put the restriction on yourself. Now, what's the question?

[BinaryPandaBear]

Sorry for the confusion.

When I'm running a torrent normally, it will download at anywhere between 30-100 no matter what I do. This led me to believe that that was the max I could download at.

The catch is when I limit the download to 1 kB/s, even if just for 5 seconds, when I remove the restriction the d/l speed jumps to 300(ish) for a couple seconds then it seems to regulate itself back to the aforementioned range.

So it's clear that the speeds i'm getting aren't because of any sort of bottle neck in my set up... Do you see what I'm getting at?

[hermanm]

Oh, I see what you're getting at. Thanks for mentioning your speeds calm down after the initial excitement. Some ISPs have QoS where they will give your transfer high priority for a short defined transfer amount or time. After that, the rest of the transfer gets a lower priority. One of the mods can see your IP so s/he can comment better on your specific situation. Are you able to consistently repeat a specific duration of time or amount of data transferred before your speeds calm down?

[BinaryPandaBear]

I'm fairly sure It's not an duration of time allowed issue for the fact that after I remove the restriction it spikes immediately (I mean from 1 kB/s to 300 kB/s instantaneously), then will immediately but gradually go back to the regular range.

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30 kB/s

(lame graph, I know; I just hope you get the idea)

[jewelisheaven]

Comcast calls it SpeedBoost... it buffers a set amount of data for you... presumably from a full-stop, so this force limit may help... Check out http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=38188 where it was covered. >< Sorry about the slow response. What you'll need to do is find out the timeframe you can do this at, and then.... follow Ultima's suggestion for implementing it. It's much more elegant than my own and requires less work.

[Switeck]

That's not ComCast's standard speedboost behavior, and I think BinaryPandaBear is actually on Canada's Shaw Cable ISP. (You mentioned that somewhere, right?)

It looks to me more like BitTorrent throttling...it's allowing some BitTorrent traffic but cannot adapt to sudden changes in speed in uTorrent. So a sudden speed change from 1 KB/sec to unlimited allows uTorrent a few seconds of speeds closer to the capability of the connection...till the ISP clamps down.

You might also be seeing this due to bad uTorrent settings, or at least they may be making things worse!

Are you actually uploading as fast as you told uTorrent to? (It should be most of the time!)

Also, are you uploading at least 1 KiloBYTE/second to every peer you're uploading to? (Any slower just causes problems...or shows there are problems.)

[oUrTorrent]

I've found that sometimes if I up my upload even just 30kb/s my download will jump and stay higher, even if I lower it back to what it was previously a few seconds later.

is it possible that it is being calculated incorrectly? even though you set your limit, you'll still be downloading over that limit for a little bit until utorrent slows things down. during this time you'll be flooded with extra data, of which you will be denying, but not all of it right away, so it might possibly be 'buffering', then 'releasing' and look like you're downloading faster than you are. I noticed in dialup days that my 5kb/s max download would sometimes seem to go slow then jump up to 90kb/s out of nowhere, and considering this is pretty much impossible for old style dialup (not dsl) there had to of been some type of miscalculations going on. I'm probably wrong though

"it's allowing some BitTorrent traffic but cannot adapt to sudden changes in speed in uTorrent."

that also may be the case. you'll all of a sudden be 'flooded' with data from seeds, and the throttling hardware/software your ISP is using will take a few seconds to identify the utorrent protocols because of all of the connections, and limit them.

how fast is your connection on a speed test? 30-100kb/s isn't really good at all, even if it is dsl. if nothing can be done about the speeds, I'd try to switch ISP's if I were you, preferably cable.

also try to keep your upload limit at half your maximum upload while downloading, because anything you download also eats into upload bandwidth, the faster your connection, the more upload speed it will use for the download.

[Switeck]

100 KiloBYTES/sec down is perfectly normal for a 1-1.5 megabits/sec ADSL line.

100 KiloBYTES/sec up is incredibly good for any ADSL line.