Very Popular Torrents Actually Download SLOWER !?

Hi Everyone!

I have a very strange problem with uTorrent!

I've configured it perfectly, and it works great! My internet connection is 5Mb (which equals about 625KB), and I am able to download most torrents at top speeds, averaging at about 500-600KB/s easy. So far everything is great.

However I've noticed that whenever I try to download a torrent which is *very* popular (for example if it has 2000 seeders, and 20000 peers), instead of getting my usual fast speeds, I can barely get past 50KB/s, and most of the time it's 20Kb/s-40Kb/s, which is PATHETIC!

So in fact very popular torrents, instead of being faster (since they have so many seeders/peers to d/l from) are actually much much SLOWER when I try to download them! Strange!

I've seen this happening too much for it to be a coincidence! I can leave these torrents on for HOURS and yet the speeds won't pick up any faster than 50Kb/s tops.

It's almost like the large number of seeds/peers is "overloading" uTorrent, and it can't establish a proper connection. Of course this is just how it "seems" to me... I am no expert! (So this is why I'm posting ... lol)

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this is happening? How come a torrent which has for example 68 seeds/283 peers I can download at MAX speeds of 600KB/s, but a torrent which has 2000 seeds/20000 peers I can't download at more than 50Kb/s!? As you can understand this is very puzzling...

Is there something I'm missing in the program settings?

Any help will be very appreciated!

And also again, I am not an expert, so if this is something very obvious/a dumb question, don't be harsh

Thanks for reading!

I fear the more likely explanation is that your ISP is insanely hostile towards BitTorrent traffic.

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=58932

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=65516

But that doesn't make any sense... like I said I have no problem downloading at MAXIMUM speeds on 90%+ of all torrents. If it were the case of my ISP blocking uTorrent traffic, then wouldn't ALL torrent downloads be affected?!

As I said, only super-popular torrents with thousands of seeders/peers have this problem... all other torrents download at top speeds!

EDIT:

Ok, I still think this is some sort of a connection overload issue, because I also noticed that with these torrents that download at SLOW speeds, my whole internet connection freezes also when I'm downloading them, even though their download speed is nowhere near my max b/w.

But with torrents that download at maximum speeds, my internet connection works fine alongside uTorrent, even though it should be the opposite.

Any thoughts?

EDIT 2:

Ok, I have tried this:

I re-applied the tcpip.sys max half-open connections patch, but this time I set it from 100 to 200, and in uTorrent I changed net.max_halfopen setting from 80 -> 150...

This seems to have significantly improve the speeds on these torrents, and also "unfroze" my internet, so that I can now run uTorrent and surf the web at the same time without any problems.

So in light of this... what do you think about the situation?

uTorrent I changed net.max_halfopen setting from 80 -> 150...

Why are you using such an obnoxiously stupidly high value for this?

Huh?! So what value should I use then? All the setup tutorials I've read recommended patching the tcpip.sys to 100, and setting uTorrent net.max_halfopen to 80.

Since I was out of options with regards to my problem (which I hope you took the time to read ), I thought I'd try this to see if it has any effect, and it did... like I said when I set it from 80 to 150 my d/l speeds increased on the "problematic" torrents, and it stopped freezing my internet too. So why shouldn't I use it then?

All the setup tutorials I've read recommended patching the tcpip.sys to 100, and setting uTorrent net.max_halfopen to 80.

Then I guess you completely ignored ours.

You don't need it increased above 8, and in many cases you actually need it reduced to 4.

Whenever I changed the net.max_halfopen setting in uTorrent from the default 8 to 80 (after patching tcpip.sys in winXP of course) I always got a significant increase in download speeds, while the default setting of 8 always gave me pretty crappy speeds.

So say what you will... you can't argue with those kinds of results!

Well in that case it must take uTorrent AGES to connect to users and get decent speeds, because when I set the max_halfopen to 8 the speeds are far lower overall. That's just been my observation.

But regardless, it seems that we have veered quite off topic here. If your point here was to express your neurosis about people's "stupid settings", then thanks but no thanks! I still need an answer to my original question

Your problem may indeed be seriously "helped" by high half open connection limit *IF* you're firewalled in uTorrent (always yellow or red light).

The half open limit has no effect on incoming connection rate...you could even briefly set net.max_halfopen to ZERO and uTorrent could continue receiving incoming connections for awhile. But uTorrent can't run torrents indefinitely that way.

The half open limit has no effect on uTP peers/seeds -- these use UDP packets and are not affected by it.

The half open limit has no effect on Teredo/IPv6 peers/seeds -- these also use UDP packets.

My guess is your networking is getting overleaded (maybe ip tables choking?) by lots of connections at once when on very popular torrents. Very poor quality routers, modems, and network cards are notorious for this.