Status bar reporting grossly inflated download speed

[aedes]

I'm currently using utorrent 1.8 on XP, with norton as my antivirus.

For the past week or so, I've been noticing a change in the behaviour of utorrent. Whenever I download a torrent, my speeds are being reported incorrectly in the status bar in the bottom. Normally, I can get around 500kb/s total download speed using utorrent, and ~300kb/s total upload speed. In the past week, this has dropped significantly to a max of 30kb/s total download speed and 30kb/s total upload speed; however, the status bar reports that I'm getting 500 kb/s total download and 30kb/s total upload. So it's not really stating the correct download speed anymore.

Port forwarding is working fine, no firewall issues, my ISP doesn't throttle, and I have everything encrypted anyways.

One hypothesis that's in my head right now is that because utorrent thinks that I'm using 500kb/s down, even though it's only using 30kb/s, it's limiting increasing the download speed any further, in order to 'optimize' it's performance based on the stated speed of my internet connection (2mb/s)

The other odd behavior I've noticed is that whenever I have utorrent running, my internet speed absolutely plummets, even though I'm only downloading at like 30kb/s on a 2mb internet connection. Again, this behavior just started recently.

So something odd is going on, and I don't think it's (entirely) to do with my own internet connection.

Anyone else have similar problems? Any ideas?

Thanks

[Ultima]

Regarding the slowed internet connection, check the first link in my signatures for some suggestions (the net.max_halfopen limit would be most pertinent -- lowering to 4 or 2). Also, try the µTorrent 1.8.1 beta.

Regarding the inaccurate download rate... Can you clarify? How do you know it's downloading at 30kB/s instead of the reported 500kB/s? Are you seeing all torrents ("All" category in the F7 category list)? Mind taking a screenshot of the UI for us to see? Thanks.

[Switeck]

I don't understand your units.

Are you talking bits, BYTES, or packets?

[thelittlefire]

You can't download or upload that fast on 2Mbit.. please clarify your linespeed and list your Ctrl-G speed guide settings.

[aedes]

Well, the problem has now magically resolved itself for the moment - the behavior I was noticing has fixed itself now.

The only way I can get the same behavior to show up now is if I disable port-forwarding... which is odd, as I didn't change any settings anywhere, and port-forwarding was enabled and perfectly functional according to utorrent, and when I checked my TCP/firewall/router settings, even when I was having those problems previously.

I think I'm going to blame this on my router for now, but if I start having the same problems again, I'll post back, with a screen shot and more relevant info next time.

Thanks

[Switeck]

What's uTorrent's half open connection limit set to?

I've read other posts that said their download/upload were inflated by NOT being firewalled in uTorrent due to 1000's of peers+seeds trying to connect to them every minute.

[thelittlefire]

.. "grossly" depends on user opinion heh. I've seen estimates and they pretty well match 100:1 ratio of traffic for connected/connecting peer traffic. With this situation certainly a picture would help

Very glad your problem is gone now in any case.

[aedes]

Half open connection limit was set to 8. I've changed it to 4 subsequently, and that seems to have made browsing with utorrent open a little smoother.

[Switeck]

Try disabling both DHT and Resolve IPs as well if you haven't already.

[thesleader]

Hi there,

I've had the same problem... it's very strange! Normally I have absolutely no problems with torrent but lately Ive noticed uTorrent has a penchant for telling me that I'm downloading globally at 222k (which is about the max my connection can handle) when only one torrent is downloading, and it is downloading at 30k for example. I have attached an image that shows you what is happening.

My thanks in advance for any light you might be able to shed on this

Thank you

[Switeck]

RSS feed running in the background?

Lots of connections on some of the other torrents adding up to a huge bandwidth drain?

Does the latest v1.8.1 beta do the same?

The picture would be easier to understand if you sorted the torrents by Status. I almost feel like there's something hidden off the screen that would explain everything.

The settings you're using might help too...at least to rule out them as a possible problem-causer.

[thesleader]

Thanks for replying,

I didnt have any RSS feeds running (to my knowledge anyway... I checked the RSS category and there was nothing there). I updated to 1.8.1 beta, but it still did the same strange behaviour. Even when I stop (not pause; although it still behaves like this when all are paused) every single torrent. And also when I set a global limit.

Here is a screenshot; i sorted the torrents by status this time

http://xs231.xs.to/xs231/08363/inflated_all_stopped_limited651.jpg

Here's a screenshot of the settings that I thought would be of importance:

http://xs231.xs.to/xs231/08363/settings745.jpg

Thanks for you help on this... it has had me confused for a couple of days now. This was the only thread that reported anything like this, so its a rare one maybe!

[Switeck]

Check uTorrent's bandwidth graph and logger windows.

Does the graph show this bandwidth consumption constantly or in bursts?

Are there LOTS of connection attempts to uTorrent?

Does the download speed decrease if DHT is disabled?

[thesleader]

1. Bandwidth according to the graph stays constantly high (1 sec res.).

1b. Logger reports: "[2008-09-03 14:55:58] ERROR! Detected halfopen count exceeds internal count 7 > 6" and then reports similar again and again with incrementing numbers it seems.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by 'connection attempts to uTorrent' im sorry.

3. Speed reported does not decrease when i disable DHT

Peculiar problem this one! Thanks a lot for your willingness to help

[aedes]

Hi thesleader. You appear to be having the exact same problem I've been having. I kind of gave up on fixing it, as it wasn't happening all the time with me, and I haven't been dowloading any large torrents recently.

What I have deduced, based on when it's been happening is the following. Situation 1) - it occurs when port-forwarding isn't set up right (ie: you have a yellow icon instead of the green one). A variation of this scenario occurs when I'm on the network at school, which does not have port-forwarding, yet utorrent thinks it does for some reason. The green icon is there, but port-forwarding isn't actually functional.

The second situation is related to my router. Whenever more than one computer is connected via wireless to my router at home, this behaviour starts, even with port-forwarding set up properly. Since I have a static IP assigned to myself to make port-forwarding work properly, I'm wondering if the router if being retarded and there is some IP conflict type thing going on on the network as a result of this. Regardless of the mechanism of this, as soon as a second computer connects to the wireless network, I get that same weird status-bar behaviour again.

http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=utorrentxs3.png

[thesleader]

Hi aedes, Thanks a lot for the info... I've noticed that the second situation you describe could be what is happening for me. Totally bizarre, but somehow it seems to be doing it! Out of interest, is your router a belkin 'F5D7230-4 Wireless G Router'? That strange thing is that the high bandwidth stays fixed, when those in my house are only using it intermittently (i.e. one web page after another). We have a well secured wireless connection as well, so it is unlikely to be anyone else. I wondered how on earth uTorrent was downloading at 230kB/sec when i had no torrents active! And managed to keep up that pace until i exited the application! I couldnt find it actually putting anything on to my HDD... so it seems logically possible that its another PC on the network that uTorrent monitors somehow!!

[aedes]

Don't have the same router as you - I'm using a Dlink DI524 right now. It's a 'well protected' wireless network too: 32 character alpha-numeric-symbolic password using WPA2, non-broadcast SSID, MAC filtering, etc.

I don't think that its utorrent monitoring another computer on the network - I think it's just there is some for of 'miscommunication' at some point between the router and utorrent, which is induced whenever TCP traffic is coming into the router from two or more different IP addresses.

I of course could be wrong, but this would explain why utorrent is correctly reporting speeds, until another computer on the network connects to the internet, even if that computer doesn't have a torrent program open.

I'm going to fool around with some of the settings on my router over the next couple of days to see if I can figure out anything obvious that would explain this (this is currently sitting pretty low on my list of things to do). But yeah, based on my experience, make sure no other computers are connected to your network, and see if you're still getting that falsely-high reported download speed.

[Switeck]

"2. I'm not sure what you mean by 'connection attempts to uTorrent' im sorry."

In Logger, do you see LOTS of peers and seeds trying to connect to your uTorrent program?

Do they quickly disconnect, especially with error 10054?

[gameboyz]

Weird.............

[thelittlefire]

Is your separate issue showing similar symptoms?