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So... This won't answer your question directly... Just as a datapoint: I use Charter, and rarely torrent. But when I do, my connection gets "throttled" in an
by palish 15y ago
So... This won't answer your question directly... Just as a datapoint: I use Charter, and rarely torrent. But when I do, my connection gets "throttled" in an interesting way. It happens like clockwork:
I reach maximum download speed (1.5MB/sec in my case), and after a few minutes of sustained speed, all internet traffic suddenly halts. It's as if the modem were unplugged. Between 1-5 min later, internet suddenly starts back up. Rinse and repeat.
As far as I can tell, this has never happened with any other program. Not once! Only uTorrent seems to trigger it. Sometimes I can torrent for about an hour before experiencing the throttling; but it always eventually happens.
I'm actually glad they throttle me, since I don't feel bad about hogging bandwidth anymore! But that's just a personal quirk... =)
There is one other interesting aspect to the throttling: during the download, my upload speed is capped to 0.5kb/sec. (that is not a typo.) And when the torrent finishes downloading, the upload speed immediately drops to zero.
In other words, Charter seems to be entirely blocking all Bittorrent seeding. My little conspiracy theory is that the 0.5kb/sec are "keepalive" packets, which trick the Bittorrent protocol into allowing me to download without seeding at all. If true, then that's very crafty of Charter... And no one complains, because no one tends to notice/care about upload speed. (and if they did notice, they probably say "yay, that's cool, torrenting without saturating my upload!". But I feel greedy.
There's probably a mundane explanation; maybe our Linksys router is misconfigured somehow? But then why does my download speed work correctly at 1.5MBs, with upload speed capped to 0.5kbs? And when a download completes, why does the 0.5kbs drop to zero?
To me, it seems like there's a mystery there. But I'm likely just stupid. =)
- redthrowaway 15y agoAre you on wireless? Apparently bittorrent tends to kill a lot of wireless routers, as it opens too many simultaneous connections for them to handle. I will regularly see my download speeds shoot up, only to crash to 0. Resetting my router fixes it, but the modem itself is fine.
- palish 15y agoOh wow, thanks! I am on wireless. I don't suppose your router happens to be a blue-and-gray El Cheapo Walmart Linksys, like mine...? Haha. It's so ghetto; I can only forward 10 port ranges total, for example. Out of curiosity, does uploading/seeding work correctly when you torrent?
- wtallis 15y agoWireless has nothing to do with it. The problem is that most consumer routers don't have enough RAM to firewall more than a hundred connections. It only correlates with wireless usage because most consumer routers are bought and used specifically for wi-fi.