Download speed is half of what it should be

[foxy22]

When I was on a 2Mbit connection with virgin media, I used to achieve around 240kb/s max download speed for torrents with utorrent, and that was about right considering 270kb/s was about the maximum for that connection speed.

Now that I'm upgraded to 10Mbit (still with virgin media) I should be getting approx 5x the speed, over 1Mb/s. I tested a dummy download file (not a torrent just a normal file download) and was getting 1.1Mb/s download speed, so all is well with my upgrade.

However, downloading a torrent today with utorrent, the most I've been able to get is about 400kb/s, which is less than half of what I expected, and that's with plenty of seeds, currently [ 24 (35) ] and peers [ 16 (45) ].

I've tweaked my utorrent according to Switeck's suggestion thread, and have tried 45kb/s and also 50kb/s upload speed. My current total share ratio is 0.725. Normally it's higher and I'll get it back up there. Is there anything you could suggest that I didn't think of to achieve the faster speed? Many thanks.

PS. I'm still on version 1.7.7 and have cancelled recent alerts to upgrade. But now I'm wondering, would that make the difference in speed?

[DreadWingKnight]

PS. I'm still on version 1.7.7 and have cancelled recent alerts to upgrade. But now I'm wondering, would that make the difference in speed?

Possibly, but we don't support 1.7.7 at all anyway, so upgrading is pretty much mandatory if you want further support.

[foxy22]

Yes, I just upgraded it and now it's running on 1.8.2. No speed improvement as yet.

[jewelisheaven]

10 Mbit down.. have you tested with the test torrents http://slackware.com/torrents/

If you can get 1 Mbyte/sec on that as well as your HTTP downloads, the problem lies in the swarms, for your .5Mbit upload that's between 5 and 15 upload slots split among your torrents. How many torrents do you run? Are you able to upload consistently. If so, then there's not much else to be done except maybe encryption. But if you're able to download @ linespeed without it, you will only notice it in cases where others are impacted due to ISP shaping mechanisms.

[foxy22]

Thanks, I'll try the test torrents. I had set my upload slots to 4 as per switecks suggestions. I only ever run one torrent at a time. My upload is pretty consistent, yes.

EDIT: Test file is the slackware 12.2.iso 3.86gb file. Wow, it shot right up to 1mb/s speed for a few seconds, so that proves that my other torrent was either not great quality or the peers and seeds are uploading slowly I guess. However, it then went right down to almost nothing for some reason, so I stopped it and restarted it. It then eventually rose and fluctuated around 400kb/s to 500kb/s for a while, then it fluctuated between 650kb/s and 760kb/s, occassionally hitting 800kb/s. .

Seeds [ 31 (312) ] Peers [ 8 (242) ] It's not hit 1mb/s since but it might still.

[jewelisheaven]

OK, so your 1 torrent, 4 upload slots, you can tick the "<90% use additional slots" option too.

As long as you keep uploading at or near your set limit, you're at the mercy of other peers. Are you connected to under 50 peers at a time?

[foxy22]

Thanks jewelisheaven. Yep, the 90% box was already ticked. Here's my set up.

Max u/l rate : 45kb/s ( 30 seems to work good too so not sure the best one, but swiveck's suggestions are I believe between 45 and 47 for my upload speed).

Max d/l : 0

Glbl max connections: 100

Max connected peers: 40 ( yep under 50)

Upload slots : 4

90% u/l speed/additional slots box is ticked.

Max active torrents :4

Max active d/l's: 2

random port used, working good.

Unticked boxes in: enable port mapping for both UPnP and NAT- PMP.

Add windows firewall exception box is ticked.

Btw, I edited my previous post.