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Upload/Download speed sample rate setting. Will fix many ISP freezeups


BHG

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(I tried to search with many combinations, but, couldn't fing the right keywords to find the right solution)

I'm not sure if the creators know this or not.

uTorrent sends & recieves small bursts which occasionally overload my ISP's transmit capability. Even with the limits set to 60% of my true capability. It is this which occasionally freezes my connection & I have to reset my router.

Shrinking the uTorrent's speed limiter's sampling perior, & shrinking the block size of the data being transmitted, will tighter regulate the up & down speed limits preventing overflow. Though this will make uTorrent eat more CPU cycles, the advantage is I and may others will not overload our ISP's speed limit even with uTorrent set to 90% speed limit.

Other advantages which become instantly noticed is that web browsing, espicially on other PCs in your network, will run much-much more smoothly and consistently, even with uTorrent set to a reasonable 80% speed up&down.

Note that the latest Azureus has a well refined speed limiter & set to 80% wont freezeups for weeks at a time, but, I dont ever want to go back to Azureus ever again.

How can I make uTorrent's speed limiter more refined so the rate overshoots I see in the 'Speed' meter stop hapening?

Unless I slow it down to 50%, just getting email on another PC at the wrong time can still kill my connection.

Overshoot example: I set my download limit to (50%) 200kb/sec, but, while downloading, I've seen spikes above 300kb/sec for a few seconds untill uTorrent gets it under control. Since the 'Speed' meter is smoothed out, who knows how high it really gets. The latest Azureus fixed this & stopped my freezups by doing so. uTorrent killed my connection 3 times already today just by setting the upload limit to 60%.

I used to use really old P2P software which had a sample rate setting for it's speed limiter. At the time, this was the crucial element in preventing freezups. It was a setting in milliseconds. It went from 50ms to 4 seconds. The smaller the sample period, the tighter the speed limiter setting became & the more stable my internet connection became. I personally used 200ms.

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Alot of the download speed gyrations are caused by mismatched (for your connection) upload settings.

The Speed Guide (CTRL+G) settings are a decent guideline, but may need minor tweaks specific to your line to get better results.

...so tell us a little more about your line and what settings you're using.

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Connection type (Current Settings)

uTorrent - Azureus - My ISP peak speed.

Download limit 200kb/s 380kb/s 425kb/s

Upload limit 60kb/s 60kb/s 80kb/s

Upload slots 8 8

Connections per torrent 100 100

Max Active torrents 5 20

Max Active Downloads 2 5

Port # 65530 65530

With only 3 torrents downloading, my uTorrent killed my xDSL connection 10 times already today, where I had to reset my Netgear router (has latest firmware). Even with 5 torrents going & the faster download cap, Azureus 2.5 & 2.3 will never kill my connection. Earlier Versions of Azureus will kill my connection just like uTorrent 1.3 thru 1.6. The earlier versions of Azureus' upload & download limit cap also allowed large (a few seconds) upload/download limit over-shoots before it got thing under control. Also, if I Increase uTorrent's UL or DL speed, it has much more chance of killing my connection within minutes.

uTorrent at these settings choke my other PC's general internet web access on the router. Things smooth out when I limit the upload to below 40kb/s. This is fairly low at 50% my available bandwidth. Azureus only begins to choke my other PC's general internet web access in the same fashion when I set the ul above 69kb/s, or, the dl above 380kb/s.

I'm using WinXP SP2 with the latest patches. I would just love to leave Azureus behind with it's hoggish .swap file access and that annoying Java junk. Other P2P sw like Emule are also rock solid when the limits are set to the same as Azureus. However, I now exclusively use the bittorrent system...

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Ah, I think I see a possible problem.

With 5 torrents at once, that's 40 total upload slots going!

Splitting 60 KB/sec upload that way ends up with each trying to get 1.5 KB/sec each.

Even with only 3 torrents going, that's still up to 24 upload slots to manage at once.

It makes lots of random upload bursts to have alot, so the other end likewise randomly returns the favor -- so you'll see the "ocean wave" pattern alot.

Unfortunately, it does that even if set with few upload slots total. And torrents don't seem to run good with fewer than 3 upload slots each.

I keep the use more upload slots if <90% upload speed checked though to partially solve that problem.

What's your half-open connection limit set to?

I lowered mine to only 4 -- it may not ramp up as fast but seems far more stable.

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I'll try lowering the half open connections this weekend when I have time to play.

And, by the way, on a regular basis, I have easily over 40 upload connections, over 10 torrwents going simultaneously, with Azureus uploading a steady 60kb/s, though, with so many uploads going, my dl speed suffers dramatically. When downloading 4-5 torrents at a time, Azureus' download speed stays nailed at 380kb/s, a perfically straight line without a dent, same for the upload speed staying nailed at 60kb/s at the same time.

One thing I set in Azureus is the MTU at 1492 which is the correct value for PPPOE connections. I also have Windows system default set to 1492 from the original 1500. I assume that uTorrent uses the system default.

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Just because Azureus seems to work ok with those settings (80+ upload slots and 10+ torrents at once with only 60 KB/sec upload speed total)...doesn't mean such settings are a good idea.

Worse, they even violate the letter and "spirit" of the BitTorrent protocol.

Meaning: it's a cheat!

That doesn't mean it's an intentional cheat on your part OR even a beneficial cheat...as you have noticed!

µTorrent has a saftey-checking feature to prevent too many active upload slots, it reduces the number of upload slots it uses to TRY to maintain a minimum upload speed per upload slot. The side-effect of this feature is download speeds plumment even worse than Azureus does using the same settings. ...as you've also noticed!

One thing strangely missing on your list of settings is global connections.

If you've set global connections high enough so every active torrent can get 100 connections...that's another problem right there!

D-Link, Belkin, and Netgear routers have trouble handling 100 total connections at once even with the latest firmware and configured correctly.

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Globals connections set to 250, maximum connections per torrent is 50.

My listed download speeds are achieved on a private trackers where non of us use public torrents, we all dedicate most of or upload bandwidth & have typically 10:1 seeders:peers on most of the downloaded torrents.

uTorrent easilly achieves the same speeds as Azureus. The choking & killing of my ISP with uTorrent where Azureus runs problems free is what I'm trying to correct.

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Ugh, well as far as I could tell at least sometimes your problem was due to high total upload slots relative your total upload speed. It just seems to work better if each upload slot gets between 3 and 10 KB/sec.

I never did catch what router you use, nor whether you use UPnP, port forwarding, or DMZ.

Nor did I catch whether disabling/enabling DHT and resolve ips seemed to make any difference.

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The router is Netgear RP614v2. Latest firmware, UPnP is off, both on router & PC, I have properly forwarded a small port range. I've beenn using the same ISP since 2003, though my router has changed which has improved performance over the last year.

I do know that im my private torrent group, many users have 10mbit full duplex connections which may be unusual for the majority of torrent users who connect with slower users rarely achieving peak speed. In my case, once achieving peak speed, having just 1 new connecting seeding peer with insane upload capabilities has the potential to overwealm my ISP before uTorrent can put on the brakes. Remember, my DSL connection is a halduplex, not full duplex connection. Going down too fast chokes up speed & visa-versa.

This is why I'm asking for a sample rate setting for uTorrents' transfer rate limiter. I know that uTorrent sevearly breaks through the limit, as when I set my down limit to 200kb/s (50% of my available bandwidth) and watching uTorrent's 'Speed' graph fly past 350kb/s for as much as 15 seconds before it gets things under control and slows the download to 200kb/s. This usually happens while downloading a single torrent with 40 seeders and 0-5 leeching peers. When starting up the new torrent, as new seeders connect, uTorrent will fly past my 200kb/s limit set.

A sample rate setting for uTorrents' transfer rate limiter most likely already exists internally in the code, however, uTorrents' coders probably just need to add it to the advanced varibles.

I do understand that as you shrink the sample rate period, you do eat more CPU cycles as the cpu keeps a much tighter throttle control over upload & download rates. The increased CPU usage may be 1 reason why they dont have the setting in the list. IMPORTANT: Such a setting doesn't affect those who connect to your PC, just your 1 downloading PC cpu usage, which is already so small to begin with, the increased usage wont be noticed except for PCs under 400 Mhz. All shuch a setting should do is help prevent uTorrent from occasionally going faster than your top speed limit setting.

As for many small speed spikes over you limit setting which you cant see on the 'Speed' graph because of it's slowed down averaged timing, it should keep those invisible bursts under sontroll too. Note that I am not asking uTorrent to improve the 'Speed' graph, it's fine the way it is to evaluate your overall ul/dl transfer rates. Though, for diagnostic purposes, it may be usefull to quicken it's response, or, better yet, there may be a good third party public domain general LAN ul/dl graphing utility with a high performance responce, helping us potentially diagnosse differences between uTorrent & Azureus to see if this is where the problems truly lie.

Do you know of any good third party graphing tools?

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  • 2 weeks later...

The first green box in uTorrent's speed graph shows my download going right thru the 375k limit I have set. When I lower it to 200k, the download finally slows down, then re-raise the limit to 375k, the the download goes at the right speed. This happens every time a new high speed seeder comes online.

ut1fd2.png

On this screen grab, I circled a chock up. Though uTorrent's speed graph doesn't show you what really happened, but, on Windows task manager, you can see the download speed hit the limit. The reverse is also true, when my upload speed overshoots it's limit, and this is usually more fatal.

ut2hy5.png

This is also what early versions of Azureus, before version 2.4.0, would do. During the high speed spikes, there's a 25% change that my connection would not recover from the choke-up and my connection would completely die resulting in having to reset my router. The new versions of Azureus run much smoother on the Windows task manager & barely overshoot ever, preventing any un-recoverable fatal choke-ups.

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Switeck wrote : "Many of those uploading to you are quite likely using something other than µTorrent, which doesn't mesh well with your upload/download limits. In short, they may be blatantly ignoring them...and there isn't a thing you can do about it."

Then, how is it that Azureus corrects the overflow within less than 1 second. Note that I tested the same torrent with the same seeding peers from the same private group.

And, as I said earlier, Azureus 2.3 and below used to have the exact same problem as the current release of uTorrent.

I do believe that it shouldn't be too dificult to improve the responsiveness of uTorrent's upload/download settings.

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Ok, one of the ways Azureus may be fixing the problem is randomly killing connections if they exceed your download speeds. Not a pretty solution in my opinion.

I do think that even µTorrent's bandwidth-handling abilities need to be seriously tweaked, as I've seen it create 'ocean waves' graphs for no apparent reason. Worse, I've seen it under-utilize upload bandwidth when it is available + peers available that are missing what I have.

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Switeck wrote: "Ok, one of the ways Azureus may be fixing the problem is randomly killing connections..."

I dont think so. it's just reacting quicker to the high speed incomming data. look:

az3nv5.png

See my red circled lumps, the number of connections remain constant througout. Initially, they do overshoot my limits, however, Azureus does slow things down within around 5 seconds. Both in the transmit & receive.

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Azureus may be snubbing the downloaders really quick. That tends to shut them up without disconnecting them.

I just noticed that your pic for µTorrent overshooting the download limit shows an overseeded torrent. Besides yourself, there's only one other leecher but 20+ seeds. So they're ALL acting as a firehose at your connection.

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  • 1 year later...

Just recently, I discovered why Azureus barely overshoots imposed speed limits & why it allows for significantly better web-browsing while downloading.

Take a look:

azantifloodem0.th.png

I bet adding 'request throttling' to UTorrent would dramatically reduce router freeze-up & allow for smoother web browsing during heavy downloads.

(Note: for 'request throttling' to work, your global upload & download speed limit needs to be properly set.)

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'rafi' Thanks a million, the is the first time in a about a year where I can try UTorrent with a new setting. I'll let you know how it goes...

You hit it dead on! :D , no more clogging up.

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