Internet being slowed down by another PC's downloads

[Flogger23m]

Odd title, I know, but try to bear with me...

Having a bit of an issue. My PC is set up in a room, where someone else also has a PC. The other person is constantly downloading things off of torrents. And this slows down my internet to a crawl. It takes 5-8 seconds to fully load Hardforum.

Asking nicely to not download so much trash has not worked.

So, aside from disabling their PC or disabling the person, what can I do to keep my internet speeds up?

I am guessing there is nothing to do, since we are on the same connection, and I will have to suffer slow internet speeds as long as this other PC is downloading. Am I correct?

If not, anyways to keep my speed up to par while he can download?

Please note that I know next to nothing about net working, how routers ect. work...

 

[pwrusr]

Lets start with the basics...
Who makes your router?
Who pays the ISP their monthly bill?

 

[Erland]

There are 2 different reasons why your internet is suffering from his torrents downloading.

Seeding - If he's using most of your upload bandwidth then your downloading of sites, browsing the internet, will suffer because you cannot send out a request for a page.

If you ask him to limit the upload of the torrent to 1/3 your upload bandwidth speed then you will have your internet back without issue.

Leeching - He's maxing out your download limit. If your on a 20MbiT connection and he's downloading at a full 2MBiT e.g. 2000KB/s (roughly) then of course you cannot download pages.

So get him to limit his upload/download speeds and you should be good. Upload set max to 1/3 bandwidth, Download set max to 2/3 bandwidth.

There should be no reason why he absolutely needs to download at full speed or seed at full speed.

If that doesn't work report him to the RIAA and be done with it.. lol

That's my $.02

 

[staticlag]

Some sort of QOS should do the trick.

As above, router type?

 

[Knyte]

Depending on the Torrent Program he is using, there should be options to limit the Up and Down speeds, max number of connections, and number of torrents allowed to run at one time.

Have him (Or do it while he's away, if you think he won't) set these options to leave bandwidth open for your use.

 

[jiminator]

one other thing, you can try logging into your router to see if it offers any QoS settings, you may be able to throttle him from there. You would want to assign a fixed ip to his computer name/mac address then throttle that ip.

 

[ReVRiN]

Lets start with the basics...
Who makes your router?
Who pays the ISP their monthly bill?

Exactly. Get your router info and we can certainly help.

If you pay the bill... unplug his/her system. If he/she pays the bill... then offer to pay half and therefore get half the bandwidth.

If mom and dad pay the bill unplug his/her system.

 

[jadams]

Limiting the speed is hardly going to do anything. Its the number of connections that is overwhelming the router. Get this person to lower the amount of connection the torrent client is using. Doubt they will as this will cut their download speeds considerably.

You will end up having to setup QoS on your router which we can help you with when you tell us what kind you have.

 

[InvisiBill]

A huge upload, whether it's from a torrent, FTP, or something else, can kill downloads. Downloads "report back" to the sending server, for lack of a better term. How fast the server gets those responses determines how fast it sends data to you. If the upload channel is being saturated, those reports can't get back to the server quickly.

The best example I have of this is the WoW patcher (uses BT) from several years ago. It had no configuration options, and actually uploaded so much that it killed off its own download. It was uploading at like 26KB/s and downloading at sub-dialup speeds. I installed a third-party app that let you throttle individual apps, and set it just a few KB/s lower (22 maybe?). My download speed instantly shot up to the max of the connection. If you head over to the DC section, you'll see people reporting issues while uploading the huge finished packets too.

If you can limit his upload to ~85% of your connection's maximum upload, either through QoS on the router or simply having him set the option in his BT client, I bet a lot of the problems will disappear. As mentioned, if he's saturating the download pipe, then other downloads (like your webpages) will have to fight for bandwidth and will be slowed down some too. QoS on the router can be configured to give priority to things like DNS and HTML, so that regular websurfing (which is generally small pieces of data) will get handled before things like FTP and BT (which tend to be huge files that take a long time to download and generally wouldn't differ much with a few KB/s slower download).

Limiting the speed is hardly going to do anything. Its the number of connections that is overwhelming the router. Get this person to lower the amount of connection the torrent client is using. Doubt they will as this will cut their download speeds considerably.

You will end up having to setup QoS on your router which we can help you with when you tell us what kind you have.

As I mentioned, I've seen a single BT-based program choke off its own download by uploading too much. Simply limiting the upload speed by a few KB/s allowed the download to max out the cable connection, up from sub-dialup speeds. I also only have 10 ports forwarded for BT, and have never had a problem maxing out my download. He shouldn't need hundreds of connections to get good download speeds.

 

[jadams]

Its not about port fowarding, the NAT table fills up very quickly on these consumer based routers. THIS is what causes the internet to slow to a crawl. Limiting the upload speed will not solve this. Furthermore if the upload speed is limited, any gain in download speed will be sucked up by the torrenting program again thus leaving the OP right where he started.

Theres so many of these "torrenting slowing down my interweb" threads and they are all answered the same way... QoS, or punching the torrenter in the face.

 

[gimp]

Its not about port fowarding, the NAT table fills up very quickly on these consumer based routers. THIS is what causes the internet to slow to a crawl. Limiting the upload speed will not solve this. Furthermore if the upload speed is limited, any gain in download speed will be sucked up by the torrenting program again thus leaving the OP right where he started.

Theres so many of these "torrenting slowing down my interweb" threads and they are all answered the same way... QoS, or punching the torrenter in the face.

riiiiiiiiight.

that's why, when I lower my max upstream by 10kbps, pages load faster.
But apparently lowering the amount of bandwidth the upstream gets isn't what's fixing the issue

somehow lowering the max available upstream in my torrent app is clearing out the NAT table on the router. Right? That's what you're essentially implying.

 

[Shadowssong]

Asking nicely to not download so much trash has not worked.

Technical shit aside, your problem is this. If you ask nicely once, great, good for you for being civil, but if they ignored you then you need lay down the law. Going behind their back and limiting their download speed is going to just cause more problems. Make a deal for them to torrent when you guys are asleep or whatever, and during the day its for normal activities.

Or you could give him a virus and then say I told you so about torrenting, but that would only be a temporary solution.

 

[jadams]

riiiiiiiiight.

that's why, when I lower my max upstream by 10kbps, pages load faster.
But apparently lowering the amount of bandwidth the upstream gets isn't what's fixing the issue

somehow lowering the max available upstream in my torrent app is clearing out the NAT table on the router. Right? That's what you're essentially implying.

Easy killer.....

I do not think your results are typical. And surely do not match my own findings along with many others. Things like this is what prompted me to run pfsense with a state table size of 50000.

Have you ever been playing an online game and refresh the server list? You probably never noticed your internet going through the floor while doing this, because you're in game, but it does. Why? because your state table fills up almost immediately, but you're using virtually no bandwidth doing this. Same thing happens while torrenting. Im skeptical that by lowering your upstream on your torrent client by a measly 10k is solving all your internet problems.