Slow speed over lan

[a.t.h.k]

I read on isohunt about companies using bittorrent over a network to update files (i think it may have been facebook) so today i have tried to attempt that over my connection..

So far i have reached 1MB/s down for around 20 seconds, at this instance i am averaging <strike>190kb/s</strike> <strike>0.1kb/s</strike><strike>0.9kb/s</strike> 1.5kb/s but for awhile it was at 0.1 - 7.9 kb/s

Both pcs are running windows 7 and are connected via wireless (not to mention on both i hit my max internet speed of 160kb/s - Australia sucks for speed)

Using a linksys WRT54Gs V5 with DD-WRT firmware install (latest).

I have setup one pc as a Tracker (enabled via the advanced settings) and nothing else has been changed really both pc's have webui enabled (not that it should make a difference).

The file i am sending is 1.36gb and so far its going to take <strike>1week 5days 23hours</strike> 2week 4days 21hours and has downloaded 143mb over a 2 hour time span whilst i was looking for answers...

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

[quick edit]

All ports for utorrent and webgui are open although over a lan environment this should not make a difference, firewalls are off.

[paintball9]

Its your wireless, On a wireless G conneection i'd be suprised you'd ever get to 3 MB/s anyways. The further you go the worse it will get. I've seen many connections limited to under 100KB due to the poor signal quality. If you want to transfer any faster you're gonna have to get a wired connection.

[Switeck]

Linksys wrt54g is a lousy router:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/26843-linksyswrt54gv5reallyisalousyrouter?start=4

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-features/30437-can-dd-wrt-or-tomato-fix-bad-routing

Answer...not really.

This means you need very conservative settings (2nd link) and disable stuff in uTorrent (1st link in my signature.)

[DreadWingKnight]

I have setup one pc as a Tracker (enabled via the advanced settings) and nothing else has been changed really both pc's have webui enabled (not that it should make a difference).

I would recommend using a dedicated tracker package, as uT attempts to guess your public IP and you typically end up with loopback messes when you do things with that.

[a.t.h.k]

@DreadWingKnight, i noticed that but only showing 2 Peers which would be the Router and the Receiving PC that was all.

@Switeck, This brand and version of router is great IMO i have never had a problem and i have had faster speeds when transferring files via windows network area ......

@paintball9, i did set the two pcs up via an ethernet cable as expected it was better getting up to 20mb/s then dropping to 10bytes then back up in a mere 1second intervals but to say the least it copied 11gb in under 5 minutes of fluctuating speeds...

SO yes wired is the way (of course) but i am wanting to know if i can at all get a higher speed that 600kb/s on wireless.

[DreadWingKnight]

@DreadWingKnight, i noticed that but only showing 2 Peers which would be the Router and the Receiving PC that was all.

Which is basically the loopback mess in a nutshell. If you use a regular tracker package, you get the two computers instead of the computer and the router and you don't have the router dealing with extra traffic between the lan and wan interfaces.

[paintball9]

On a lan you can skip the whole tracker mess and just run DHT (non private settings on the torrent creation) It will automatically find the peers, and will only connect if they have the same torrent.

As for the ethernet speed thing. I'm assuming you're using 100mb lan. which has a max speed of 11 Megabytes per second. So when you see it jumping from 20-0.001 its most likely just reading the data wrong. the transfer speed is probably uniform at 11 but it has trouble determining how fast in real time so it appears to jump.

Its also possible that you're maxing out the connection, whenever you see it jump up and to compensate it throttles down. this process would repeat over and over again and its limit would be determined by the fastest transfer speed of the slower machine.

Honestly torrent isn't the most practical of applications for lan transport. It is more useful in situations where bandwidth is valuable and you want to ensure proper transfer with the least amount of retries. For you're situation you'd be better off to use samba or ftp where it doesn't have to scan the files for hash values first. (you're close enough that you can just try the file to see whether or not it has transferred properly) and Windows home group should set up the majority of the stuff for you very easily.

If you must use wireless be aware that your router is very inadequate for the speed's you are trying to achieve and will most likely limit your connection greatly (unable to handle that volume of udp packets) However DHT will improve speeds quite a bit as you won't be trying to communicate with a tracker and won't be sending data through the wan interface it will all be local. And like I said above windows file sharing/samba/home-groups would be way more useful to you in your current scenario than torrents would.

[DreadWingKnight]

On a lan you can skip the whole tracker mess and just run DHT (non private settings on the torrent creation) It will automatically find the peers, and will only connect if they have the same torrent.

Wrong setting. DHT doesn't work over LAN properly. That's why we made local peer discovery (but it still needs private flags OFF)

[paintball9]

My bad, I didn't realize that was a separate technology.