On 07/04/10 12:45, David Reynolds wrote:
You might be hitting the bandwidth cap and hence be being throttled (see here http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html) or there could be another possibility. I tend to find that uploading (which you tend to do a lot of with bittorrent) drastically reduces the download and upload connection speeds, so if you limit the upload speed of your torrent you may find this helps overall.
If I understand the throttling correctly, if I'm getting throttled I should still have 75% of my bandwidth in each direction, so I should never go below 2Mb/128k. I'm seeing less than 20k up and not much more down.
There is probably a technical reason for why uploading limits the download speed too ... hopefully someone will come along and explain....
Well a typical download requires you to "upload" the request (eg for web browsing lots of separate HTTP requests), and also TCP will require a fair bit of handshaking (ie sending messages back), so when you run out of upstream bandwidth everything grinds to a halt. But according to the bittorrent software I'm not getting anywhere close to the limits, and it is often the case that another PC on the same LAN can access the internet fine even though I can't from my desktop, unless I kill the torrent software.