Re: Torrents killing my connection
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Andrew Reid
> <reidac@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>> Â Is this only true of torrents, or is it also true of large
>> downloads? Â What happens if you try to pull a few megs of
>> something?
>
> Usenet seems to work fine. But there I'm downloading in pieces of
> course. Is the anything else I can put through the paces to trouble
> shoot?
.
torrents have many simultaneous connections open, on a badly
designed modem this will fill the NAT table and cause traffic flow
to become sluggish, or halt completely, on really bad modems they
just crash and need a hard reset - a single connection download will
not replicate this situation. Try dropping the maximum number of
connections setting in the torrent client, perhaps cut in half each
time for test, to see if it is the modems inability to manage a
large NAT table.
>
>> Â I've had problems from time to time with MTU auto-discovery
>> and TCP frame-size negotiations, and the symptoms are generally
>> that small-packet, low-bandwidth traffic is fine, but big
>> downloads stall out all the time.
>
> I'm getting it with uploading alone, downloading with the
> connections
> set to 6 & not going fast either.
.
If you max out the uploads then the downloads will slow to a crawl
because the notification of receipt of each chunk will be stuck in
the upload queue, and often dropped out if the queue fills, which
means it takes much longer for your client to tell peers it is ready
to receive another chunk. Try dropping max upload to half your real
connection capacity, see what happens.
>> Â Modern routers (including WRT54Gs) are pretty good about this,
>> but network drivers play a role too, and they do differ between
>> the various OSs you've tried.
>
> Don't know... is the driver different in UNR 9.10 & 10.04? How would
> I check?
.
It could also be that *nix torrent clients have much heavier default
settings than windows clients, and so windows clients never ask the
network to do as much work as *nix clients do. Also, the windows
stack itself is fairly lame and so doesnt load the nic as much as
*nix stack does. Again, lower the default settings in your torrent
client and see if that improves things (especially the maximum
overall number of connections)
Tim.
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