SUPER slow download speeds - plz help!

[MizzGee]

I've been having some extremely frustrating issues with BitComet over the last three weeks or so. Up until then I was downloading files at an average of 700 kb/s, (depending on the popularity of the torrent, of course). Since then it seems that I can only achieve those speeds every fifth or sixth download. The other five or six I'm only reaching speeds of 70 kb/s at the absolute MAX, usually I'm only downloading at an average of 30 kb/s. I haven't actually been counting how many downloads until my speeds pick up, but it does feel fairly consistent that it's every 5 or 6.

I would like to add, that i do have a yellow light, indicating that my listening port is blocked, but I have no memory of ever having a green light there. More over, I have achieved download speeds of 700+ kb/s while I had the yellow light, so I wouldn't think that's a factor in my problem, however, at the request of a support agent at bitcomet.com I did go through the steps listed in the bitcomet wiki for both auto and manual port mapping, which seem to have changed nothing.

99% of my downloads are TV shows and 99.9% of those all come from EZTV. A couple days ago I was able to download this "]torrent at an average speed of 503 kb/s. A couple hours later, however when I tried to download the next episode in the series "]here (with more seeders and fewer leeches) I could only download at an average of 48 kb/s.

To try and speed things up I've even purchased a 10G VIP package, but even VIP enabled it seems to do nothing to increase my speeds. Any help would be extremely appreciated..I used to get faster downloads when I still had dial-up!

Specs

Bitcomet 1.31

Internet: Fixed Wireless

Modem: LinksysWRT160N

Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit

Speedtest: 5.43Mb/s download / 0.59Mb/s upload

[greywizard]

Rationale:

LinksysWRT160N is not a modem. It is however a router (+ switch + access point).

Hence you must have another device which feeds the Internet connection into your house (unless you use Metropolitan Ethernet or a WiMax/mobile connection).

Since you fail to mention what type of Internet connection you use ("Fixed Wireless" is a very vague generic description) we can assume quite a few different scenarios.

Until you provide us with the full modality by which you get access to the Internet we can't tell you how/if to try and open your port.

The fact that before this you still didn't have an open port may or may not be very relevant.

Each torrent swarm is unique.

There are often times when I connect to a torrent and see it instantly jumps into the 800-1300 KB/s range in seconds from starting it.

Then when I look into the Peers tab I can see that there are 2-3 LT-Seeds which are feeding me all the bandwidth and that the actual BitTorrent transfers haven't even started yet.

So the speeds you got before, are not an accurate indicator of the fact that before there wasn't a problem; just merely that you were a rather lucky person.

You may have simply run out of that luck, as far as BitTorrent goes, for the time being.

So, if possible you should bend over solving that yellow light for now as a first step towards fixing your speed issues.

[MizzGee]

I do apologize, I mis-typed. I do know the difference between a router and a modem. I recently switched Internet companies, so as far as a modem goes, I don't really have one, anymore. It's more like a power hub (really don't know what you call it). i also don't know what else to call my internet. It's a wireless signal that I get from a 4G tower (I'm in a rural area).

As for my luck running out, it has to be a little than just luck that kept my download speeds going. I've been using bitcomet for the last 5 years or so. Never before this past three weeks have I had to deal with speeds of 17kb/s. That can't all come down to lucky torrents.

[kluelos]

If you connect via 4G then you are almost certainly firewalled at the tower, and cannot become connectable. No matter what you do, unsolicited inbound traffic is blocked upstream of you by that firewall. You won't be able to get this changed. The firewall is there to block unwanted traffic to mobile phones. People get really ticked when they find all of their minutes used up by advertisements, etc., so that's not going to get unblocked.

[MizzGee]

So we're chopping this all up to lucky torrents coming from speedy seeds? Nothing more to be done?

[The UnUsual Suspect]

When you can't receive remote initiated connections it becomes more difficult to gather peers. If I'm running the same torrent and I'm given your IP and port number as a prospective peer to trade with and I attempt to connect to you, this connection will never complete. If you eventually become aware of me and send me a connection attempt, we can then begin trading, but only if I haven't reached my limit of trading peers by that time, if I have, then you're just out of luck.

Then we have another peer, we'll call him "joe". He also has a firewalled connection so not only can you not connect to him, he also cannot connect to you, so there is no possibility of you trading with Joe. The only cure for this would be to get an better internet serivce, you can liken yours to a telephone that won't receive incoming calls, so you can talk to anyone, but only if you place the call, and you can never talk to someone with the same service you have.

When using popular torrents, there is a good chance you'll find enough good peers to connect to without needing incoming connections, but if you have a torrent that has few fast uploaders, then you may struggled to download them.

[MizzGee]

I understand all that, I really do, and please believe me when I say that I'm not normally this impatient or abrupt but I just can't chop this up to a firewall on my 4G tower. For 5 years I had consistent download speeds. The change in speed I'm referring to was so dramatic and so sudden I had actually been thinking that BitComet had changed something when it came to the connection of it's free users. I had thought that things had been changed to reserve the best speeds for the VIP users, in the hopes of selling more VIP packages. I just cannot believe that my five years of excellent download speeds came down to luck. Just two days ago, speeds of over 700 kb/s with a torrent with just over 400 seeds, and then a couple hours later less than 50kb/s on a torrent with over 2200 seeds? That just doesn't add up.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

This has nothing to do with vip, it's possible you do have another problem. Bitcomet doesn't directly control the speed of your downloads, that is determined by the ability of your (connected) peers to upload, and your internet connection speed. The first rule of bittorrent is the more you upload, the more download you'll get, so if you're giving a lot to a peer, it will give as much back as it is able. This is written into the protocol, bitcomet cannot change that, but what it does do is lets you connect to peers from other sources, using other protocols. One of the most successful advances is bitcomets LTseed network, which can greatly enhance your download speed and this increases as you advance in rank, but of course this too requires there are sources available.

If you want to know if there is something preventing you from downloading from fast peers, try downloading one of the popular Linux distributions. Here is a torrent for ubuntu linux...

http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-12.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

They are usually seeded by users with fast connections, so you should get the maximum speed your connection will support, if you don't, then you definitely have a problem.

[kluelos]

VIP service hasn't been a big success, and it won't help if you've already got a fast connection, which I do. I don't use VIP at all, except when I'm asked to test something.

So if something big had changed at BitComet, it would have happened to me too, and I'd be yelling about it. (None of us on the tech support staff work for BitComet, we're all unpaid volunteers.) We yell pretty loud.

What sounds most likely to me is that your undescribed 4G connection had somehow escaped notice and was not firewalled for some reason -- maybe a beta or prototype project.. Then somebody spotted it or finished testing, and did drop a firewall on it. That would account for your dramatic slowdown.