Bittorrent brings my internet connection to a crawl

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

When I don't have bittorrent running, I can download files at 200-300+kbps, gaims stays connected, everything seems to be fine.

But as soon as I load one up, it all goes down the drain. BT usually uploads a total (over all the .torrents running) of 40KB/s and uploads anywhere from 10-90KB/s, way below what my connection should be able to handel.

I have all the ports set up right as far as I know, if I run shadow's experimental client I see that there are remote users connecting to me, which means the ports are set up correctly.

Is there anything I could do or try to change to help this?

ikaro · Advocate Joined: 14 Jul 2003 Posts: 2527 Location: Denmark

iam not aware that you can change the settings of bittorent.
However you can with some traffic shaping software, somehow, restrict how much bandwidth you use for the uploads so that your line isnt saturated.

usually keeping it at under 10% of max capacity will allow you to download / upload and still keep your connections without timeouts.

How, with which software and how to set that up, is something i dont know.
But if you think it makes sense, maybe you can fint some info about how to acomplish that somewhere n the net.
_________________
linux: #232767

searcher · Apprentice Joined: 13 Mar 2003 Posts: 175 Location: NL

Bittorrent is overqueueing your internet connection. This means your modem is forced to handle the queue, which modems aren't usually very good at. If you are using the `official' bittorrent client you can restrict a few things, so bittorrent takes care of not over-saturizing your connection:

neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

you can emerge bittorrent-theshadow for more options;
but please do not disable uploading or set it so low that
no one will benefit from it. bittorrent is great because it
actually works. it puts a lot of trust in people uploading
what they download. don't break the system.

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

Yeah, I'm on a site that tracks your download/upload ratio and boots people who don't share, so I couldn't turn sharing off even if I didn't mind leeching off other people's generosity. Thanks for the tips, I'm using theshadow's client.. I'll have to try out some of those options.

Koon · Retired Dev Joined: 10 Dec 2002 Posts: 518

Your problem comes from upload trafic killing download bandwidth. ACK packets from the download get lost in the maxed upload traffic.

You can use a traffic shaper on the Linux network stack to have ACK packets prioritary. The LARTC WonderShaper is such a shaper. You lose a little bandwidth but you can upload and download at the same time (and keep a nice 10ms ping).

http://lartc.org/wondershaper/
I use it together with Shorewall (as a tcstart file). Note that the CBQ version works better for me than the HTB version. Needs tuning.

-K

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

Thanks for the tip, koon.. I'll have to try that program out