Is my Utorrent speed fast enough on my broadband connection?

[Cadwell Parker]

Hi all and thanks for reading my first post here.

I've been using Utorrent for some time without any problems but it seems to max out at way below what I'd imagine for my broadband speed.

I have an 8meg o2 package and speedtests are always in the region of 7.10mb/s d/l and 0.8mb/s u/l which seems fair.

So, if I have say 4 files seeding all with a few leechers, I can pause three of them and the one left running will upload at 120-130kb/s. If I do the same with the other three files in turn they all upload at a similar rate.

If I run them all at the same time the total upload remains fairly constant around the 120-130kb/s mark but with this being shared between the 4 files.

I wouldn't expect the total upload rate to necessarily climb to 600kb/s but thought there might be some increase.

Does this sound about right or do I need to tweak some settings to get it to upload faster.

I have to say I'm quite happy with the way it's working, just wondering if this behaviour is normal and if 130kb/s the fastest I can expect to be able to upload?

I'm running v2.0.4 with unlimited u/l and d/l. My window XP pc is connected to my O2 wireless box via an ethernet cable. I have tried adjusting the settings using the setup guide but the only change was if I set it for 768kb/s u/l where Utorrent set the u/l limit at 70kb/s and my u/l rate fell accordingly.

Thanks for reading

David

[DreadWingKnight]

uTorrent displays in *byte/sec

speedtest sites and your internet provider documentation give you in *bit/sec.

Expect such factors in the difference.

Post a speedtest.net results image with no torrents running please.

[Cadwell Parker]

Thanks for the superfast reply...

http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/4180/speedtest9910.png

[Cadwell Parker]

I had meant to include in my original post how I'm getting the same thing happening with my downloads too.

I seem to have roughly 850kb/s available which gets split between two or more files. One well seeded file might d/l at around 850kb/s but if I add any more the first file will slow to accommodate the second. If the second is equally well seeded the two will d/l between 3-500kb/s each with the total remaining constant around 850kb/s.

As I said earlier, settings are set to unlimited in both directions.

David

[DreadWingKnight]

uTorrent getting 850kbyte/sec is about the max you're going to get for your connection because that's all it's capable of.

[Switeck]

Your confusion will go away once you write out the complete units for each speed measurement/result.

Instead of kb/s, write out whether you mean kilobits/second or KiloBYTES/second.

The latter is almost a magnitude larger.

[Cadwell Parker]

Ok, so I've been confusing kilobits with kilobytes? Maybe so.

If that's the case and after doing some online reading into bits vs bytes Utorrent is transferring data at more or less the maximum speed which my broadband connection will support. So 130 kilobytes per second upload (KB/S as expressed in Utorrent) translates, according to the conversion factors I've seen to 1064.96 kilobits per second (1 kilobyte = 8.192 kilobits), and my download of 850 kilobytes per second comes out at 6963.2 kilobits per second which is roughly what my speed tests give me.

Utorrent is expressing the speed as kilobytes while my broadband is expressed as kilobits.

Am I understanding things correctly now?

Looking at it this way Utorrent is doing a good job of using all the available capacity my broadband line is offering :)

David

[Ultima]

Yep, you have the conversion correct.

[Cadwell Parker]

And about time too probably :-)

At least it's good to know my Utorrent is working as well as it can.

Thanks to all for your help

David