[PLUG] Ultumix v0.0.1.0 2008 Final Pre Release

Wil Cooley wcooley at nakedape.cc
Thu Dec 13 17:19:58 UTC 2007


On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 08:58 -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:40:23 -0800
> "drew wymore" <drew.wymore at gmail.com> dijo:
> 
> > > Aha! I did not think of that. Indeed, I do have Comcast. And as far as
> > > I know, they are still playing dirty pool with torrents. After 7.5
> > > hours my average is 22.5 KB/s.
> 
> > Don't go with Qwest (As the ISP). I was visiting my parents over the weekend
> > and until I shutdown my torrents they kept disconnecting me. Maybe go with
> > one of the local places like Hevanet. Call and see if they do any bandwidth
> > throttling or traffic shaping.
> 
> I keep wondering if it is just the settings I have in Ktorrent that are
> the source of the problem, rather than Comcast. For example, all my
> other internet activity is not slower. If they were throttling someone
> using torrents, would that not affect all my traffic?
> 
> I also just noticed in Ktorrent that there is a dropdown for "engine,"
> which lists bitoogle.com, bittorrent.com, bytenova.org,
> isotottents.com, Ktorrents, and mininova.org. It is set to the
> bitoogle.com by default, as I never even knew this dropdown list was
> there. It might have been added during a recent upgrade. I wonder what
> those things do.

They're search engines, for searching for torrents. They have no effect
on your bandwith. Part of the problem is probably that cable modems are
highly asymmetric--back when I followed these things more closely, their
upstream bandwidth was on the order of 128kbps. BitTorrent is designed
to favor users who share more, so your limited upstream bandwidth
hurts. 

Another suggestion, albeit counter-intuitive, is to cap your upstream
bandwidth to 80%. Part of the communications process with TCP requires
sending acknowledgement packets to the sender. If these are getting
dropped or delayed due to congestion, then the sender will re-transmit,
which also hurts your performance.

Finally, you also need to set up port forwarding (assuming you're using
a firewall) for the upstream to work at all, which causes a worse
penalty than having limited upstream bandwidth. Of course, you will also
need to ensure that the port is opened on your host, if you have
firewall rules there also.

There are numerous FAQs out there about BitTorrent which you should
probably read if you're having problem.

Wil




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