High upload rate = slow downloads?

D

dmonkey

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 14, 2004
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Why does your download speed slowdown if you have a lot of kb/s going out?

I've got fios 10/5, if my upload goes over about 100 kb/s my download chokes down to only 100-200kb/s when it's usually 1.0mb/s down, which seems to be a rather strange phenomenon.

Any insights?
 
Did a bit more searching, guess the verizon is crapola. I should have known.:rolleyes:
 
Downloading requires "confirmation" packets sent back to the source to let it know that you're still downloading fine at that speed. If you completely saturate your upstream bandwidth, those packets can't get through and the download will slow down or even stop. This is somewhat common with BitTorrent clients with no limiting - I personally had it happen with the WoW patch downloader. It sends out so much data that it chokes off your download. Simply limiting my upload rate to a few KB/s lower using a third-party program restored my downloads to full speed (as the confirmation packets could now easily get back to the source).

However, 100KB/s is well below 5Mb/s, so I don't think this is your problem. If the router is especially crappy, it could be bogging down trying to handle all the data going through it, but once again, it doesn't really sound like a whole lot of data, relatively speaking.

Have you done a speed test to verify that your upload isn't set to something like 800Kb/s? If there's a problem with the connection or your plan and it's limiting the upload to ~800Kb/s, then your 100KB/s upload would indeed be saturating your upload, as I first mentioned.
 
Is this a torrent or direct upload?

The Verizon router has a VERY small NAT table, that's why a lot of us turned it into a bridge and put a real router behind it. Once that NAT table gets full, things start dropping.

I have a 25/25 from FiOS, and I've been able to maintain 3.4MB/s each way on torrents with a pfSense router. I'm sure that would bring the Actiontec to its' knees in seconds.
 
They're torrents. While I was thinking along the lines of (Invisi)Bill's response, I did a speed test and got 1800kbps upload, so it's probably the NAT. Thanks guys.
 
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