Jump to content

Performance impact of peer IP resolution ...


captaincrisis

Recommended Posts

First of all please let me thank you for the work you have put into uTorrent thus far. It is an oustanding BT client.

... I am doing a little testing to try to understand exactly what is going on but on several occaisons now I have noticed that turning off peer IP resolution results in a significant d/l performance improvement for me. Has anyone else noticed this or am I hallucinating?

uTorrent 1.4 running on Win XP SP2 / Sygate Firewall / Linksys Router

Cheers

Steven

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. If you go to the lower pane (the detailed information) for any torrent and switch to the <peers> tab you get a list of the peers in the swarm. Right clicking on any of those gives you an option to eith er enable or disable "peer IP resolution". I'm not sure if this just toggles the flag you mentioned?

Turning this on to instruct uT to resolve IP addresses into domain addresses (and thereby country info) seems to cost me approx 20% of my download speed. I'm sure this is far more than the simple extra network traffic overhead. I was wondering if anyone else is seeing this and if they ARE if it is a possible area of interest for the devs. Are the IP/address maps cached?

Hope this helps, thanks for the reply.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are you translating from a non-English version? Mine says "Resolve IPs".

Basically what it does is perform a reverse DNS query on each IP. From that, it can use TLDs and flags.conf to assign a flag to a peer. (TLDs are eg. .co.uk, if the DNS ends with that µT assumes it's a UK flag, but for example bigpond.com is an Australian ISP but all .coms default to USA, so you can specifically set bigpond.com to show the Australian flag with flags.conf.)

If you have a slow internet connection and there are loads of peers, it could adversely affect your speeds, I s'pose.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks splintax

Are you translating from a non-English version? Mine says "Resolve IPs".

So does mine

Basically what it does is perform a reverse DNS query on each IP. From that, it can use TLDs and flags.conf to assign a flag to a peer. (TLDs are eg. .co.uk, if the DNS ends with that µT assumes it's a UK flag, but for example bigpond.com is an Australian ISP but all .coms default to USA, so you can specifically set bigpond.com to show the Australian flag with flags.conf.)

If you have a slow internet connection and there are loads of peers, it could adversely affect your speeds, I s'pose.

Yep. And that is my whole point. I think it is killing 20% of my download speed. Is anyone else seeing this? Meanwhile I will just run with it off.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yep. And that is my whole point. I think it is killing 20% of my download speed. Is anyone else seeing this? Meanwhile I will just run with it off.

Sound logical ! What is your GUI refresh rate ? I think it will effect this 20% . I have it set to 5 sec. Why don't you try increasing this time-interval and see it it reduces the speed drop ? Let me know.

I believe the solution could be - to totally AVOID updating all tabs when they are not opened/viewed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

what do you thing of my idea to totally avoid updating data in any tab that is not currently visible ? except maybe the speed graph tab ... this way we can also conserve more CPU power...

PS(edit) :

Unless this IP resolution effecting only the display of the speed, I tried it, and I think I too noticed a sudden increase in speed when I cancel the flag of the IP resolution... :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

µT doesn't draw hidden elements afaict, nor does it draw the GUI when closed.

And i think the IP resolution has an effect because a) it generates more connections and B) uses bandwidth for every lookup

It's probably even more noticeable for users with limited upload.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks everyone.

I tried to do some more testing over the weekend but with the internet being what it is I have realised that I am never going to get a repeatable test case! Sheesh.

Bottom line for me is that I *think* I get faster downloads when I run minimised and with flags turned off. Results vary from 0 to +20%. CPU bandwith is *NOT* the issue here.

Since I cant see the flags when I run minimised, which is 99%, of the time I have decided to leave them off!

As a side note I wonder if issuing a DNS query to your ISP for all the clients you connect to could be considered ...... errrm "leaky". Not that anyone using BT would be concerned with privacy of course.

Cheers

cc

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...