High upload, low download, satellite ISP, detailed information, help

[thesilentarmy]

Because of where I live, which is out of the reach of the cable company, I have one of the worst, most not worth it ISPs in all of the US (if not the world), and that would be HughesNet. It's satellite Internet that is unreliable and overpriced but is the only alternative some people have to dialup.

In case you don't know, the Satellite Internet companies have a Fair Access Policy, which limits the amount of files you can transfer per day/per month, depending on your plan. If you cross it you'll get shut down to less than/equal to dialup speeds for a day/month. However, during the hours of 1am and 6am, I have unlimitted use of my Internet so I use the scheduler to download.

Now, I generally get between 0.1kbs and about 5kbs, but sometimes it goes up to as high as 20 or so, and rarely a little higher, but it usually doesn't stay there for very long. Depends on the torrent. These are torrents with a decent amount of seeds too, by the way.

What really frusterates me is that while I am downloading impossibly slow, I'll be uploading at like 10kbs to like 60kbs, which isn't exactly super fast, but it's a lot faster than I'm downloading. It's frusterating to see that I've uploaded three or four times more than I've downloaded before I even actually get the file. It's not that I don't want to share, but what's the point of sharing if no one can share with me?

I would honestly be happy if I could at least get a steady 10 - 15kbs. It wouldn't be fast, but it would be possible.

Is there anyway that my upload speed is somehow decreasing the efficiency of my download speed?

I have a hard time believing that it's the settings because when I take my laptop somewhere that has cable, I get normal, fast cable speeds.

[nusrathaakif]

Speed Problems

[thesilentarmy]

Yes, it is a speed problem.

[Switeck]

It's probably the kind of BitTorrent throttling hardware they're using PLUS general network shaping hardware that ISP is using that causes that.

Have you tried very conservative settings?

Like disabling UPnP, NAT-PMP (since you're guaranteed firewalled in uTorrent anyway), DHT (both kinds, since you're probably trying to get private torrents and/or public torrents with many seeds/peers that doesn't need DHT), and Resolve IPs (since that only increases bandwidth used but doesn't increase your torrent file speeds).

Reduce global and per torrent connections to only about 40 and 20.

Reduce bt.connect_speed from the default of 20 outgoing new connection attempts per second to only 1-4. Leave net.max_halfopen at 8...it shouldn't cause a problem that way.

Try setting global max upload speed as high as 50 KiloBYTES/second and back down 5 KiloBYTES/second at a time and test each for about 5-10 minutes to figure out which one seems best.

You may need to use a proxy server/VPN to do tracker updates to avoid Sandvine-type BitTorrent disruption/throttling ISP hardware.

[thesilentarmy]

I tried the things that I knew what you were talking about, haha, or that I could find the settings for. I'm not sure if it was coincidence, things are running well tonight, or what, but it seemed to perform slightly better. It goes up and down a lot. It's never steady at anything. I read on a forum at DSLReports that some guy did a test and that they don't throttle the port it uses on my ISP... whatever that means. Someone said something about not having a static IP probably had something to do with it. shrug.

Oh well.

[Switeck]

uTorrent uses a LOT of outgoing ports by default, same as web surfing does.

However it should only use 1 incoming connection...