All 5 active downloads go to 0 after 30 to 45 minutes.

[BILLY9999]

I am running version 1.27 Ever since I have installed this, 2 weeks, I have a problem downloads which are running at anywhere from 50 to 500 k download speeds just go to 0. Then I have to reboot the VISTA machine and then I can run for another 30 to 45 minutes.

Has anybody had this problem? Could it be my ISP (Time Warner) or my computer?

Thanks

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Look for a topic titled "READ THIS before posting"

[BILLY9999]

Version 1.27

Business cable modem 15 down 1.5 up

I have a business class modem and a Dlink N Router

One line coming out of the modem to the router. One line coming out of router to switch. All Pc's are connected to switch

I am running Windows Vista 32. Windows firewall is on and the port is excluded. I also have zone alarm and the port and program are excluded.

I am running AVG free.

Speedtests are as follows: speedtest.net 15 down 1.5 up ping time 21ms

Anything else just ask.

[kluelos]

Your symptoms are classically results of running too many tasks at once. This means that no one task gets enough of your upload bandwidth. With bittorrent, you must give in order to get.

What happens is that each peer in the swarm tries you but finds that you are a slow/unreliable trade partner, so finds someone better to trade with. Eventually, you go through the entire swarm, and no one is left who wants to trade with you, so your download speed goes to zero. When you restart the client (which rebooting would do), then all of the peers treat you as new to the swarm, so they try you again, but in time, they all give up on you and your speed drops to zero again.

Given your low upstream bandwidth, you probably can't afford to run more than one seeding and one downloading task, at any one time. Watch your tasks and see that they are getting at least 8 KB/s uploading. That's the bare minimum for you not to be an undesirable partner.

This can be exacerbated by not having an open listen port, which means that nobody can initiate contact with you.

ZoneAlarm is infamous for problems with P2P, and for continuing to filter even when it is supposedly turned off. I don't recommend 3rd party firewalls for anyone except experts who know exactly what they're doing, and recommend that you uninstall ZA completely. You do not need multiple firewalls, they don't make you more secure. They DO give you multiple configuration headaches.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

I suspect you might have a problem with your router/switch setup too. Can you try connecting your PC direct to the modem and see if the problem is still present?

If not, then you are probably overwhelming one of your devices that is trying to handle thousands of communications all at once and ends up not responding at all, so everything grinds to a halt. Also check if your using any type of packet scheduling software such as QoS in your router. Dlinks guide is horrible when it comes to setting up bittorrent and will cause your torrents to grind to a halt. I spent several weeks playing with the QoS settings to try to improve my VoIP phone call quality and my streaming video playback. The end result was at best, reducing my torrents to about half their normal speed, and at worse, reducing them by 99%. I even tried setting bittorrent protocol to the highest priority, the result was still slightly slower then if it was disabled completely, PLUS it made browsing and phone calls nearly impossible.

My conclusion was that it's best to not use packet scheduling at all if you want good performance with your torrents.

[BILLY9999]

I forwarded the port through my router and turned off QOS and lowered the up down speeds to 250 down and 100 up and with those settings I can keep 3 to 4 active without stopping. It's a little slower than I would like and I am sure I could get the files faster if I did one at a time with increased down speed but ok...

Thanks for the help

Edited May 3, 2011 by BILLY9999 (see edit history)

[greywizard]

Actually you don't necessarily need to limit the download speed, unless you need to save bandwidth for other running applications.

If the tested speed is really 1.5Mbit then you can increase the upload limit to 145KB/s and still have enough spare bandwidth for protocol overhead and additional applications such as browsers and others.

That ought to increase your download speed a bit.

Of course the number of running tasks has a bearing on this, since all the active tasks divide the upload bandwidth between them and on the downloading tasks your download speed is strongly related to your upload speed.

But note that download speed will still vary greatly depending on each torrent's swarm.

My connection allows me to download many torrents at a steady 2.5MB/s and still I encounter many torrents which won't go further than 50-150KB/s, simply because the peers in the swarm can't upload faster than that.

But once you've configured your client properly, there is nothing to worry about on that level anymore.

Since you're using XP you should also make sure that the TCP/IP stack's settings are tuned accordingly to your line's capacity. This may improve quite much the actual download speed too, if your system is using the default TCP/IP settings at present time (especially the RWIN parameter size has an important effect).