Uncharacteristic Heartbeats

I'm using uTorrent and I'm getting these peculiar heartbeats, smaller on the UL but more noticeable on the DL. Does anyone know why? They also seem to be linked.

This happened after I upgraded to 1.8, 1.7.7 was perfectly fine. It seems alot of people are having problems with the newest version.

- uT 1.8, WRT54G, Charter cable.

Is your upload cap set to about 70-80% of your max?

Not just a lack of a max upload speed limit may cause that...allowing too many connections at once or hostile ISP activity can cause such "heartbeats".

So I need to raise the upload speed? Doing that will only cause the DL speed to drop significantly.

No, I'm just saying to cap it to an appropriate value. If it's too high, you'll get weird behavior like that.

That, and download speeds are never consistent because other peers choke you and so on.

Peers and seeds often choke and release in a 15 or 30 second cycle.

...Maybe even longer depending on other circumstances.

Seeds tend to cycle through their peer lists and only upload to as many at once as they have upload slots allowed per torrent. So they too can make periodic bursts.

But I've reached ceiling before I had upgraded to 1.8 and it was always consistent, almost a straight line.

Demand can change, what torrents you're running can change...whether there's a greater seed-to-peer ratio can change. Your computer may auto-update a lot of programs on there...so it too can change.

And I still don't know what kind of settings you're trying (and obviously failing) to get good results with.

Settings are almost EVERYTHING here...I can crash many computers in under 10 seconds flat with uTorrent settings changes.

Well, this applies to almost all torrents, even well-seeded Ubuntu and OOo ones. Like I said, the settings didn't change from 1.7.7 to 1.8, but 1.8 seems to be giving alot of people problems.

My cable company throttles me to ~80 kB/s 4PM-1AM Mon-Fri.

So, it could be worse!

Sometimes bad settings still work ok.

This is especially true of borderline bad.

But until we can compare them with what your line's rated as, I'm inclined to believe they're bad and you just never noticed.

Are you talking to me or FireXtol? My line's rated at 5 mbits.

you I guess...I doubt your line's rated for ONE megabits/second UPLOAD.

Do a speed test...ISPs really like to milk the "up to" part of the speed and seldom actually deliver it.

It's rated at 512kbit upload.

My ISP doesn't milk the speed, nor do they throttle. I've had ceiling speeds up to 1.8 and 1.8 seems to be crapping everything up. Now torrents can't even be sustained.

You used the xx/512k setting in Speed Guide (CTRL+G) or 512 kilobits/second upload settings in 2nd link of my signature?

I tried it but all it did was lower the DL to 100... instead of the 500 i get now.

And are you setting per-torrent speed limits?

Nope.

Such an odd problem: OOo torrents now work fine. Up to ceiling <10 sec. and no beats.

Do you have a lot of force start torrents?

These override queue limits.

There's gotta be a common link here...but I just don't see it.

The only time I see peaks and valleys like that tend to be overloads...and hostile ISP disruption.

No, all torrents are on regular mode.

I've haven't had overloads or anything, and OOo torrents work now. But all other torrents don't, although they have 4000k+ seeds and peers.

I do know for my line when I try to upload too fast (faster than the line can go), download speed drops...often resulting in bursts/spikes and troughs/valleys.

Trust me, I am uploading very little compared to what the UL line can give. I UL after I DL so it can leave it seeding.

Here is a pic of an OOo torrent run. Before is what I get on two torrents with 15,000+ peers and seeds total, and after is OOo by itself.

Ok, that clued me in to something...15000+ peers+seeds is potentially a huge bandwidth burden once they start trying to connect to you. And their connection attempts may be rather bursty too.

But I've ran 10+ torrents before with MUCH higher counts and that wasn't a problem.

But it's weird considering OOo is fine.

HTTP is also fine.

I don't know really what the problem could be.

My guess is, extreme torrents (15000+ ips) may find a weakness in your networking hardware and software...sometimes.

Hopefully, Firon can post again with one of his magic solutions...because I'm sunk on ideas.