Cox + BiTorrent = Kills Firefox/IE

9mmx19

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 6, 2004
Messages
1,556
Recently got Cox, and at first it was fine. But now when I start a torrent (uTorrent), browsing just dies. Obviously it should slow a LITTLE but sites just timeout completely in either browser. If I start a torrent and THEN try to open Firefox 3, itll take a couple minutes for the window to even open. IE7 (64) opens immediately but times out. After I stop the torrent and wait a few minutes, everything will be back to normal.

Im assuming this is Cox screwing me but wanted to make sure. I dont suppose theres anything I can do. Also why wouldnt FF even open? This is on Vista 64 if that matters.
 
I also use cox (CT) and had similar problems using a really old netgear router. Using an older computer as my router seemed to fix the problem. When you switched to cox did you get a new router?

The problem could be that the router cannot handle all the concurrent connections that Bit-Torrent is trying to make.
 
Do you rate limit bittorrent, especially uploading? If you let it max out, you'll drown out your upstream HTTP GET requests, in addition to TCP ACKs.
 
i think it's your router...


my old netgear craps on itself... got a coworker with a new dlink and same cox service, his stuff runs fine.
 
Cox has recently started doing what Comcast did as far as throttling BitTorrent traffic. I have been using BT services for many years now and things started to slow down around late March, early April. There was a press release about it and everything.

I thought it was my router so I switched to a beefier system (Pfsense, IPcop, Untangle, etc) and they all yielded the same results....slow slow slow.

I found that even if you were only downloading BT traffic at 5kbps your internet browsing and download speed gets significantly reduced.
 
mine has been going strong with cox after upgrading to a beefier router.

I consistently get speeds over 500kb/s per torrent when there are alot of seeders.

Web browsing slows down quite a bit when I have a few downloads going over 200kb/s or so, but I have not played with any QOS settings yet.
 
This is quite common on routers with no form of QOS.

It feels slow using other things on the internet as you are uploading too much ,meaning ARP packets get delayed, and making things pretty slow.

Just go into utorrent and set up a max number of connections which is quite low (this fixes problems with cheap routers hint hint nudge nudge, netgears), and set a upload maximum at less than your line of capacity.

Your ISP is not causing this, dont just blame them! Get a router with some form of QOS if you wish to overcome this problem more effectively. Also by the way, if your isp does throttling, it only affects unencrypted bittorrent transfers, and does NOT affect http, smtp, ssl etc...

You can easily get round bittorrent killers by setting forced encryption in ur client and using a port number which is relatively low (e.g port 80 if it isnt in use)
 
Im actually not using a router at all.

I found that even if you were only downloading BT traffic at 5kbps your internet browsing and download speed gets significantly reduced.

Yes this looks like whats happening. The torrent itself can be downloading at a very slow speed and my browsing is still dead.

My max upload is much lower than the max Ive seen at dslreports so its not that.

I think Cox has just flagged my account or something because earlier this month when I just got the service I didnt have this problem.
 
Turns out it was NOD32 as pointed out in another thread here.You need to exclude your torrent client (or just switch to something else like I did).
 
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