At wit's end with Bit Torrent slowness. Advice?

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RanceJustice

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 9, 2003
Messages
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Hello all.... things are getting really nasty between bit torrent and I. What was once a loving, understanding relationship has become muddy with miscommunication :p

The Problem: Whenever I try to use Bit Torrent, my normal browsing slows to an absolute crawl. BT isn't going very fast either. This happens even when I'm substantially under my max up and downspeed. By substantially, I mean even at <10kb/s

My connection: VerizonDSL 3.0/384.
My brand new router: Buffalo Tech Gigabit Dual Band 802.11n WZR-AG300N. I am connecting wired to this, not wireless.

My general BT settings: Upload capped at 30kb/s. Download uncapped. 80 connections allowed per torrent. 100-200 allowed globally (i've tried between. Azureus and uTorrent have different opinions of what settings to use here). Using ports 5002, 5004, 5010. Usually 5002. NAT light is green.

Currently: Downloading 1 torrent ( yes, its legal. Its a japanese TV show) 20kb/s down, 11kb/s up. Rest of my connection is slow as hell.


This started awhile ago.... I remember a time I could upload at 30K, DL at over 200, and it still not influence browsing or other tasks. I have no idea what has gone wrong. At first I thought it was my old router, which consequently was on the Azureus "Bad" list. This new one is quite a bit more robust from what I can tell, however. So what the heck is going on? Anyone have a clue? Thanks!

Edit: It may be worth mentioning that the browsing slowdown happens even when just /seeding/ a torrent (at 11-15kbps). So it can't be that I'm using too much download bandwidth... hmmm..
 
That router might not be up to the task. What router did you upgrade from?
 
Xaeos said:
Currently: Downloading 1 torrent ( yes, its legal. Its a japanese TV show) 20kb/s down, 11kb/s up. Rest of my connection is slow as hell.
Click to expand...

It's not, unless you're in a country that doesn't follow international copyright or the show is freely redistributable. :p (For the record, you do not have to give details of what you torrent, we don't care)

2nd and on topic: I will point at the router if this used to work before the new router. Can you try directly plugging into the DSL modem and see if you have the same problem?
 
Xaeos said:
The Problem: Whenever I try to use Bit Torrent, my normal browsing slows to an absolute crawl. BT isn't going very fast either. This happens even when I'm substantially under my max up and downspeed. By substantially, I mean even at <10kb/s
Click to expand...
You need a router with functional QoS to do p2p without affecting your browsing.

I would return that router and opt for the D-link DGL-4300 or DIR-655. Both will let you p2p to your heart's content without slowing the web.
 
Almost doesn't sound like a QoS issue either, I mean, this happens even when he's downloading at 10kb, at that point, it shouldn't be a bandwidth issue.
 
that would explain why he can't get high enough download speed, but not why his entire connection slows to a crawl.

Personally, I think the router is just getting flooded with connections that it can't handle... that would explain the slow download speed and why his connection slows overall. I also didn't see a reason why he switched routers... if the old router was so great, why switch? Who cares if it's on the "best use" list or not... if it works, it works.
 
a lot of ISP's are packet sniffing and throttling BT traffic

easy fix you can try, and hopefully solves your issue

get utorrent, the latest build and force encryption in the menu somewhere (use the wizard to enable it but go in the settings and force it, it wont force it from the wizard)...problem solved

http://www.utorrent.com/
 
Leb_CRX said:
get utorrent, the latest build and force encryption in the menu somewhere (use the wizard to enable it but go in the settings and force it, it wont force it from the wizard)...problem solved

http://www.utorrent.com/
Click to expand...

Woah, good idea. I just downloaded the newest version of uTorrent. Have to try that since I've been having speed issues the past few months as well, which has probably been my ISP.

But if you force encryption, doesent the tracker and other seeds/leachers have to have encryption turned on as well?
 
WhiteZero said:
Woah, good idea. I just downloaded the newest version of uTorrent. Have to try that since I've been having speed issues the past few months as well, which has probably been my ISP.

But if you force encryption, doesent the tracker and other seeds/leachers have to have encryption turned on as well?
Click to expand...

to be honest, I am not sure, but I've had it on for about 3-4 month and no issues, BT's came back to the speed they were before my ISP started sniffing packets and it works like a charm...give it a try and let me know how it goes
 
Leb_CRX said:
a lot of ISP's are packet sniffing and throttling BT traffic

easy fix you can try, and hopefully solves your issue

get utorrent, the latest build and force encryption in the menu somewhere (use the wizard to enable it but go in the settings and force it, it wont force it from the wizard)...problem solved

http://www.utorrent.com/
Click to expand...

Yep...I encrypt. I also use a different random odd ball port from week to week.
 
Utorrent encrypts data and supposedly keep ISP from packet shaping. (someone beat me to it.)
 
WhiteZero said:
Woah, good idea. I just downloaded the newest version of uTorrent. Have to try that since I've been having speed issues the past few months as well, which has probably been my ISP.

But if you force encryption, doesent the tracker and other seeds/leachers have to have encryption turned on as well?
Click to expand...

If you use encryption, then the other clients you connect to have to support the encryption protocol. It does not mean the other person has to have it enabled, as their client will just enable encryption for your particular connection (if they allow this operation).

utorrent, Azureus, ktorrent (probably a few others) all support the Bittorrent encryption protocol.
 
Thanks guys. The main reason I switched routers was not because of this, but because by old WRT54GS wasn't carrying a strong enough signal strength to provide wireless service to another desktop in the household w/ its wireless card. The Buffalo has fixed this. Also, I did have the problem on the old WRT54GS as well, in regards to bit torrent traffic. I've been having this torrent problem for the past 6 months or so. Prior to that it was great. I was hoping that it was simply that the Linksys simply couldn't handle the connections and that just switching to the Buffalo would help. It really does seem like a pretty robust home use router.

I don't know if anyone saw my edit, but I recently tried just seeding a torrent (I believe it was only at 13-15 upstream of about 35max limit, with 8-12 peers connected) and had the same slow-to-a-crawl effect.

Also, I've tried this both on uTorrent and my old favorite/standby Azureus. I didn't try encryption on Azureus, but I've been running encrypted on uTorrent (with ability to fall back to unencrypted if peers don't support) and that seemingly didn't fix anything.

Finally I called my ISP, VerizonDSL, and they claim they don't do any packet shaping or filtering of traffic. Then again, I think I got Bangalore on the phone so... who the heck knows. They blamed it all on the file sharing software and claimed that it was eating up all of the bandwidth, despite explaining to them that I was neither uploading nor downloading anywhere close to my max bandwidth.

Any idea what I should try? At this very moment things are slow and I'm still seeding that torrent, forced encryption (outgoing) on uTorrent.
 
Personally, I'd say to check out DD-WRT and see if that will fix anything. I used to have a similiar problem with my Linksys router, until I installed DD-WRT and set the connections to time out after a short period (initially, connections were set to time out after a horrifically long time)
 
As of right now DD-WRT isn't supported/tested on this router yet, according to the Wiki. Doesn't surprise me too much as its very new.

The Buffalo I have has QoS options that can be turned on. What settings should I use? Create an entry for 5002 TCP and 5002 UDP, put them both on High priority?

Gambit - what options would I be looking for for timeouts?
 
Unfortunately, the Marvell 88F5181 processor in the Buffalo isn't really fast enough to accomodate effective QoS. You can try it, however.

I take it you didn't do any research before buying that router, because it is among the worst for use with torrents, as per the SmallNetBuilder.com review.
But those of you hoping to put the AG into service for BitTorrent or other P2P filesharing will be a bit disappointed with its ability to support simultaneous connections. I was able to reliably achieve only 64 simultaneous (32 up, 32 down) connections. This is much better than the Belkin N1's unusually low 10, but less than the D-Link DIR-655's 120.
Click to expand...
Compare it to the competition here.

The slow processor in the Buffalo also slows throughput when you use wireless encryption better than [the insecure] WEP64:
I saw losses of around 6% and 10% for WPA AES and WEP128 respectively.

As I found in the Belkin N1, WPA TKIP was once again the worst performer with around a 22% throughput loss. Actually, I had such a hard time getting WPA-PSK TKIP to even work at all that I would recommend avoiding it if at all possible.
Click to expand...
 
Xaeos said:
What settings should I use? Create an entry for 5002 TCP and 5002 UDP, put them both on High priority?
Click to expand...
If 5002 is what you use for torrents, you want that priority to be low. Alternatively, you can set DNS (port 53) and HTTP (80) as high priority.
 
Well... that does seem curious.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there are a lot of people out there doing P2P with standard WRT54G (GS) routers? I've seen tutorials (including the azureus wiki) mentioning to limit to less than 200 connections, or 100 connections - but according to that chart, it can only handle 8? That seems to be quite the discrepancy! During my search I turned up what turned out to be positive reviews on this router, as well as Buffalo routers in general, so I thought it was a good decision.

Anyone shed some light on this? Not saying that you're wrong Ken, I am just trying to figure out the difference here.

After all, so many people are downloading torrents today, many using WRT54G or similar routers, so I wonder why they are not having nearly as much trouble. What I mean to say is, if 90% of home use routers are insufficient for bit torrent, we wouldn't see nearly so much torrent traffic!
 
Xaeos said:
Well... that does seem curious.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there are a lot of people out there doing P2P with standard WRT54G (GS) routers? I've seen tutorials (including the azureus wiki) mentioning to limit to less than 200 connections, or 100 connections - but according to that chart, it can only handle 8? That seems to be quite the discrepancy! During my search I turned up what turned out to be positive reviews on this router, as well as Buffalo routers in general, so I thought it was a good decision.
Click to expand...
There are six different versions of the WRT54G, and some are better than others. They tested v5.0, which is the first version to drop down from 16Mb RAM to 8Mb. V5.0, 5.1, and 6.0 all stunk. See Smallnetbuilder.com's review.

Many are using the WRT54GS and WRT54GL with DD-WRT, which is more efficient than the stock firmware. However, even with DD-RT, the WAN->LAN routing speed ultimately limited by their CPUs. The more you are doing (wireless encryption, QoS, etc), the slower they become, as you can see with the benchmarks over on the DD-WRT forums.

After all, so many people are downloading torrents today, many using WRT54G or similar routers, so I wonder why they are not having nearly as much trouble. What I mean to say is, if 90% of home use routers are insufficient for bit torrent, we wouldn't see nearly so much torrent traffic!
Click to expand...
Moving from a WRT54GS with DD-WRT to a D-Link DIR655 just about doubled my network throughput with torrents, although admittedly I don't have a typical connection (FiOS @ 50Mbps). I upgraded primarily to improve my VoIP QoS -- with the WRT54GS, I got poor quality sound on my phone after uTorrent had been open for awhile, and that is absolutely unacceptable for a connection with 5Mbps upstream.
 
Xaeos said:
Currently: Downloading 1 torrent ( yes, its legal. Its a japanese TV show)
Click to expand...
What makes you think downloading Japanese tv shows is legal? I'd guess it's copyrighted material.
 
yeah i switched from azureus to utorrent when my connection started getting clogged by azureus, to the point that my wireless connection would always cut out every 30 seconds or so.

utorrent did the job for me.
 
Lethal said:
What makes you think downloading Japanese tv shows is legal? I'd guess it's copyrighted material.
Click to expand...

Well, on top of the fact that it is broadcast content... many shows are not sold in this market at all. There has long been an understanding (though the exact legality of which I am not sure, I admit) that as long as it isn't licensed for sale in the USA, downloading Japanese content has been given an "ok". After all, its the way that many production companies decide what to release here.

Perhaps I should have said "allowed" instead of "legal" :D

But back to the router issue at hand...

Ken - Wow, I can imagine that with FiOS it becomes much much more important to have a good router. I wish it was available in my area.

So far it doesn't sem like uTorrent makes any difference for me. :(
 
Do you have the latest firmware for your router and latest drivers for your nic?

sorry if it's been asked already.
 
TheCreator said:
Do you have the latest firmware for your router and latest drivers for your nic?

sorry if it's been asked already.
Click to expand...

The router shipped with the latest firmware according to the website. I'll try updating my Nforce onboard nic drivers... usually nervous about doing that. Nforce drivers can be odd...
 
Updated my NIC, still slow, no go.

Thinking about giving that DIR655 a try - it seems to be at least as good as the buffalo except it doesn't have the 5.8ghz band. There isa DIR855 on the way, but its not here quite yet. I wonder if it will matter.. Most wireless devices don't operate on the 802.11a band anyway.

Edit: Tired of waiting, decided to order DIR655 from the egg. They have a promotion for a free 2gb flash drive with it! Only $130 for this router. Much cheaper than the buffalo. If it works as good as Ken says, I'll be saving money.
 
Once you get the DIR-655, be sure to upgrade to firmware 1.3.

Then set torrents to the lowest priority (255) using Advanced -> QoS. Here's a screenshot:

qosdo8.gif


For your reference, the default priority on web traffic is 128 when automatic classification is enabled.
 
Don't copy the settings above exactly because 198.168.0.10x isn't the default DHCP address range.
 
Justintoxicated said:
So this D-Link is better than a router with DD-WRT ?
Click to expand...
Yes, the DIR-655 and its processor are significantly faster than anything available with DD-WRT support. No DD-WRT router can sustain anywhere near as much throughput with QoS and dozens of simultaneous connections.

Certain routers running DD-WRT do have an obvious advantage when it comes to 802.11g range because you can run the radio way of spec to provide maximum coverage.

Can it also be used as a bridge?
Click to expand...
Yes, but the options aren't as extensive as you get with DD-WRT. I haven't personally tested bridge mode on the DIR-655. Moreover, I think it would defeat the point to use a single DIR-655 in bridge mode with another router.

If you are looking to expand wireless range through a 3-4 story home, I would go with two Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 running DD-WRT. Configure one as a bridge and set the xmit power on both to 80-100mw (the default is 28mw).
 
Well I'm using the Bridge to connect multiple PC's in my room to the main wireless router. I'm obviously not allowed to run a wire through my landlords house on the floor and we have no attic. :p

I'm planning to eventualy replace my primary router as well (It's a hunk of crap netgear that constant disconnects...)

but my bridge is dead so I have no network right now.

I'll start a new thread I guess.
 
I dunno if this will help at all...but with comcast it seemed that anything under 50k (ports) was absolutely horribly for torrenting. I could never get more than 20k in either direction.
 
Xaeos said:
Well, on top of the fact that it is broadcast content... many shows are not sold in this market at all. There has long been an understanding (though the exact legality of which I am not sure, I admit) that as long as it isn't licensed for sale in the USA, downloading Japanese content has been given an "ok". After all, its the way that many production companies decide what to release here.
Click to expand...
I have to disagree with you. Just because the copyright holder has chosen not to release it in the US (or has yet to do so - for all we know they may be in negotiations for distribution rights) does not mean they relinquish control of such copyright, which is covered by international law. No one has "given an ok" for you to download it.

It's just that a copyright holder is likely to be less aggressive in enforcing their rights in a country where such illegal downloads are not competing with the sales of legitimately licensed products and cutting into their profit margins.
 
You guys think your internet is bad, we just upgraded ours and I feel happy when bittorrent is downloading 20k a a second...Usualy I am at 10k a second or less it takes weeks to get anything, and the internet is extreamly slow as well. And thats after my landlord just switched us over to the faster cable...I usualy only have like 4-12 connections anyways...
 
ISP's like Rogers Canada and many others have found ways to sniff / throttle encrypted packets as well, this occured last year sometime, with ISP like rogers you basically need to configure VPN set'ups to get around them for now until they find a way to sniff that.
 
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