Upload speed unstable, initial seed

[boblydan]

Greetings all!

I'm seeding a new torrent, and I'm having difficulties getting the upload speed stable.

Here's a rather illustrative screenshot:

Since I started the torrent, it's set to "initial seed". At first I had upload limit at 150kB. This was too high, and resulted in unstable speeds, with lots of dips and prolonged inactivity. I set it to 30kB, as that's where the upload speed seemed to be stable.

I then tried setting the upload speed according to the speed guide, at 90kB, but the problem still persisted. I had to go down to 35kB to get reasonably stable upload, and even then there's some dips in upload speed.

I'm using WinXP with SP3, Lenovo T61 laptop with 5400rpm harddrive.

Speedtests usually give me a download speed of 15000kbps, and upload speed 900kbps quite consistently.

Any clue?

-edit-

Forgot to add, incoming connections are OK (green sign in statusbar), port forward tests are OK. Comodo firewall is configured to allow traffic to uTorrent port, and uTorrent as allowed application. UPnP is active and funtioning

And how can there be 1 of 5 peers connected (2 in swarm)? Doesn't make sense to me, but I'm not a wiz at this either

[Switeck]

Are you running the latest uTorrent version?

If you're only connected to 1 peer (1 of 5) and it "hiccups" for any reason, your upload speed will take a nosedive as shown by the graph. It's best to have about 2-5 connected peers at once to maintain an upload speed of greater than 10 KiloBYTES/second. With 1, even latency issues can cause slowdowns.

If your upload speed is only 900 kilobits/second, then 150 KiloBYTES/second upload speed would be impossible.

Do you ever see the "DISK OVERLOAD" error message at bottom left of uTorrent's window when trying to upload faster than ~50 KiloBYTES/second?

(If so, uTorrent v1.8's advanced Disk Cache settings can help!)

[boblydan]

Greetings, Switeck sire!

I upgraded uTorrent to the latest stable build now. I was using 1.6.1, actually. I guess the autoupdate feature should be turned on, eh? ;-)

There's 3 peers connected now, I've set the upload limit to 35kB, and it seems to be quite stable. It's frustrating with such slow upload when my download is quite good. But that's how it works with ADSL, I guess. According to the recommended uTorrent settings I should be able to upload at ~90kB, yeah? Oh well, I guess people will have to patient.

And I haven't seen Disk Overload error yet. I've only seen this when downloading Linux distro's at mad speeds. I cap my download limit at 1500kB to avoid this.

[Switeck]

Have you done anything (besides the speed test/s) that suggests your connection really can upload at ~90 KiloBYTES/second? That speed test could've been some short-duration burst mode just like the SpeedBoost feature that ComCast has. ~1 minute of high(er) speeds, great for really messing with speed tests.

Also have you ever seen download speeds beyond ~1 MEGABYTE/second?

...Have to be an awfully big file to see that for long.

[boblydan]

I can't really say that I've seen upload speeds up to 90kB/s, no. I reckon ~60kB/s is the highest upload speed I've ever seen from my computer, but it's typically lower than that, around 40kB/s.

I have indeed seen downloads over 1MB/s Maximum speed recorded was ~2,0MB/s, but that made my disk overload, hence the cap at 1,5MB. I could not believe my own eyes when I first witnessed this. This is rare though, and typically happens when I download Linux CD's / DVD's (ISO-files) via Bittorrent from nearby universities with insane bandwith, and also FTP from the same locations. It must have been straight from the backbone or something.