knightrd Posted July 4, 2008 Report Share Posted July 4, 2008 I'm having a problem with bandwidth allocation in uTorrent. When I set a bw allocation to high for a torrent, it massively slows down the torrent to below 20 KB/s. This occurs regardless of whether I have multiple torrents running or just a single torrent. I've tried setting other torrents to low bw allocation to see if that helps, but the behavior remains the same. As soon as I set the bw allocation to normal, everything returns to normal and speed dramatically increases. My goal was to give preferential treatment to a torrent without pausing or stopping other torrents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hermanm Posted July 4, 2008 Report Share Posted July 4, 2008 Upgrade to the latest version because you are many builds behind.Your situation makes me think that if you overallocate your bandwidth beyond your possible speeds (80% of your upload & download speeds), you will see a drop in your overall speeds. My upload speed is between 640kbps and 768kbps. If I set it for 768kbps, my overall speeds usually suffer. I have to leave it at 640kbps so I do not overallocate. Could this be what is happening with you? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knightrd Posted July 4, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 4, 2008 Your first idea was the right one. I was avoiding doing it mainly because the auto update feature was failing to work correctly and I probably assumed that I wasn't that far behind in the builds. I manually downloaded the latest RC and now I'm not able to duplicate the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted July 4, 2008 Report Share Posted July 4, 2008 The auto update should be working properly now... it only worked half the time before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted July 4, 2008 Report Share Posted July 4, 2008 knightrd,You seem to be on ComCast Cable ISP.The low tier offered by them is 6 megabits/second down and 1 megabit/second up.The high(er) tier offered by them is 8 megabits/second down and possibly 2 megabits/second up.However they have been throttling/crippling/disrupting BitTorrent traffic like crazy since about September 2007. Are you using the xx/1mbit (1 megabit/second) upload speed setting in Speed Guide (CTRL+G)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseiler Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 @Switeck, I know Comcast has done the well-known seeding disruption, though I've never once seen it myself, but I hadn't heard that they're throttling too, like, say, some Canadian ISPs do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 ComCast is throttling where I am, in so far as I sometimes cannot even maintain 2+ peer connections while seeding (typically in the weekday 4-10 PM timeslots). You can't upload at any speed if you don't have any connections.Often, ComCast instantly drops any BitTorrent upload connections that they identify as going faster than 30 KiloBYTES/second. ...And no doubt that upper speed limit is configurable. Makes it REAL hard to send a friend a big file. This coupled with the minimal connections I can maintain at once (often fewer than 6) effectively forces the total upload speed well under my current upload max of ~1 megabits/second (about 125 KiloBYTES/second max in tests). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knightrd Posted July 5, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 Yes I have Comcast. My speed tests show an average of about 20Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up, but it's my understanding that a lot of ISP's do some kind of caching or acceleration to skew the results. When it comes to torrents I've found that throttling uploads at 100KB/s seems to get the best results for me, unless I'm strictly seeding and then I can take it up to 125KB/s reliably (though it will slow down web). Patching XP SP2 with older tcpip.sys and forcing it to allow 100 connections helped a lot. So did running TCP Optimizer. In fact, the changes were dramatic after I made those tweaks. I use the 10Mbps setting and manually edit the max upload speed. Though I play around with it a lot depending on my intentions. Sometimes I need to get a few large things quickly, but other times there may be hundreds of things I want to download (ebooks) so I modify the settings a bit for that type of usage. I seed to 300% at a minimum and usually far beyond that. Outside of torrents, I've seen download speeds of 500KB/s - 1.5MB/s for Visual Studio 2008. Even on my low RPM laptop drive, running multiple applications, I can push 2MB/s for large concurrent downloads. I understand bandwidth costs, but the real issue is corporate greed. Even though Youtube is a money sink right now, that is basically the direction of the future. Plus sites like Hulu and services like Joost are going to grow more and more popular. If net neutrality goes the way of the dodo, the benefits of having high speed will disappear. Other than appearances, why would you want a sports car if you couldn't find gas to make it go places? As far as I'm concerned I should be able to run the connection flat out 24/7 (with some reasonable traffic shaping for high traffic times). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseiler Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 @knightrd, yes, typical speed tests on Comcast are rendered pretty meaningless by PowerBoost, which increases your speeds long enough for the benchmark to be skewed. Helpfully, Comcast came out with their own fancy benchmark page recently, misleading even more people into thinking their rates are a lot higher than they are. Sustained transfers from very fast sites are the only reliable method.@Switeck, I bet that's why I haven't seen it: my torrent UL rates are kept below 30KB/s. Happy accident, I guess. But Comcast is supposed to discontinue their Sandvine use at the end of the year, or at least discontinue how they've been using it up to now, but you just know what's coming after that: monthly quotas. I can feel that coming. I just hope it's something high like 100GB, since I have never come close to that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 I use the 10Mbps setting and manually edit the max upload speed.Classic newbie mistake. Speed Guide (CTRL+G) is asking for your max upload bandwidth to convert into max upload speed + other settings. So you should use xx/1mbit (1 megabit/second) max upload speed setting instead of the xx/10mbit (10 megabits/second) max upload speed setting.Or you can try the 2nd link in my signature for (slightly) more conservative settings for uTorrent based on upload speed. I do however set more active torrents at once than uTorrent's Speed Guide for some of the faster connections. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knightrd Posted July 5, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 Well I understand what the setting means, but when I use the 1Mbps setting my download speeds drop to 1/3 of what they would be otherwise. Maybe it'll work better in the latest RC. I've tested it a LOT in the past, but guess I will revisit it now.There's a calculator I use online to tweak my settings and I generally like that a bit more than Ctrl-G. I will look at the guide to see if there is something I'm missing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 If you're using the other values given by Speed Guide's xx/10mbit setting, then you need to DRASTICALLY reduce your max upload slots per torrent!25 upload slots at once to potentially 15 torrents at a time means you hate the people you're sharing with so much that you're only giving them an average speed of less than 0.34 KiloBYTES/second. That's BAD for dial-up speeds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 Your actual upload speed is probably 768kbps, possibly less, due to Comcast's Powerboost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knightrd Posted July 5, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 Ok I adjusted down the 1Mbps setting. After I move some stuff to external storage, I'll queue up a dozen movies and see how it plays out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseiler Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 @Switeck, regarding Speed Guide asking for your max *upload* bandwidth, that's really easy to miss. I didn't know that for quite a while myself early on and assumed it was asking for download bandwidth. Yes, it is right there in the paragraph of text on the page, but that involves reading, and people are not about to do that.I recommend putting the phrase "upload speed" in bold. Better yet, bold red. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted July 5, 2008 Report Share Posted July 5, 2008 rseiler,I totally agree with you.Check the 2nd link in my signature...I think Speed Guide needs more than just that tiny change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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