DeeLoaf

Note: This is cross-posted from a thread I had started on broadbandreports.com

Fiddle dee dee. Or some such. And I'm sorry to drag this back up, but just wanted to post the result of a couple little experiments.

First off, that one, happy, WORKING torrent situation I posted about on the 2nd is inexplicable. I've since NOT seen any kind of consistency, wtih uTorrent or other clients, although I have witnessed the occasional short lived burst of uploadability on some other torrents. It was really great to have uploading working for that one file, which happend to be a newly relesed episode of a popular live saturday night television show. I really was uploading at 60KB+/sec with one or two peers getting 25KB/sec+ from me consistently until the torrent finished.

But alas, somehow it was just this one torrent. The others I tried subsequently all crawled along with very sad upload speeds. I totally dont understand how once in a while it will talk to a peer properly and yet most of the time it (seems to) tries to go fast and it gets kicked back down by some 'mystery force'. The statistics graphs in Azureus or uTorrent both generally look like the Himalayas, peaks and valleys in a pattern, centered around 10 kbps. They get up to 15-20, and then back to 0 briefly. Up and down. Unless I limit my total outbound to anything under 10kbps, then it is like a flat line.

For my first experiment, I am using a VPS box that I rent from openhosting and have installed the rtorrent client there, so that I can hop on the same torrent on another computer on another ISP at the same time I'm getting it (trying to at least) on my cogeco connected computer. Last night, I downloaded a torrent of a popular animated tv show (featuring a fat kid and a jew among other characters) both from my peecee at home and on my VPS. The vps had no problem jumping nearly instantly to max out the soft-throttled upload I'd set, first 50kbps, then 100kbps, then 150kbps. Oh those peers were clamoring for all the data I could send it would seem. From my VPS. Same torrent from cogeco, well, seemed like the peers just didnt want to suck anything off me faster than say 3.2 kbps on average (this with 71kbps soft upload limit set in Azureus or uTorrent). It was really weak and I wanted those shows so when the VPS finsished getting them I aborted the one I was running locally and just sucked it down via FTP at 500kbps, but having to do that was lame.

Anyhow, today as another experiment, I tried to seed a torrent from my cogeco PC, just my cogeco PC seeding to my VPS. It should have been maxing the upload, but it crawled along at 3.2kbps upload. For good measure, I tried uploading the same freakin file via FTP to another directory on my VPS. Upload maxed at 75kbps or so, no problem. So I tried a different client again, BitComet this time. It seemed to slowly creep the upload bandwidth up, and it held stable around 9.5kbps, which is at least an improvement over the other clients. Interestingly, BitComet has a "minimum upload speed" option on a per torrent basis as well as the standard max upload speed. I set min upload speed to 60kbps on this torrent, and well, it didnt have much of an effect at all. The receiving end (my VPS) still only got 9.5kbps from the BitComet seed. I tried FTP again at that time and it had no problem eating up the available 65kbps of upstream that BitComent for some reason wouldnt/couldnt use. The VPS should have sucked up all my upstream, but that did not happen. (just using the VPS to download torrents, it has no trouble adhering to any bandwidth limits I set up, up to about 300kbps in both directions, so there are no VPS connectivity issues to come into play here.)

A third experiment run just from my local machine using Azureus and adjusting max upload speeds produces this very interesting graph when seeding:

1) at 5kbps, uploading is uber-stable. Good.
2) with an increase to 20kbps we see an immediate spike, then mystery-effect "throttling" it down. We see the himalayas until the next change
3) change to 10kbps introduces stability. good.
4) reduce to 8kbps increases stability. good.
5) lets try 15kbps. similar pattern to 20kbps attempt, spiking, then throttling.
6) reduce to 12kbps, no change in peak-valley behavior.
7) reduce to 11kbps, again no change in peak-valley behavior
8) reduce to 10kbps, stability returns.
From this I must conclude that something is going on which is kicking upload speeds back down when they try to increase beyond a certain point. I can also conclude that the effect is much more pronounced when I set an upload limit higher than 10kbps.

It would appear that some mystical effect is affecting JUST BT (and almost but not quite 100% of the time, oddly, as evidenced by the abilty to upload for that saturday night tv show torrent), the effect happening for JUST ME, and a select few other subscribers it would seem, people who were running fine, then this started happening to them, and then it just doesnt-get-better-(TM). Also the problem just randomly happens to start up for ME after I decided to download (with corresponding maxed contantly 71kbps uploading for days on end) a few whole-season popular teevee shows and one or two whole-series teevee shows in a one month period. And to top it off the effect kicking in after a month of heavy up/downloading is supposed to be just a coincidence, and Cogeco is supposedly NOT responsible for this very, very odd behavior.

Its frustrating. I Will update with new future observations if there are any. And thanks to others for sharing theirs.