Torrents

So, I'm a former exclusively-DDL user transitioning into torrents. DDLs served me well for years, but there are just too many options now and it's impossible to get everything you want on a single one (and every time I sign up for a 3 month plan the site goes down within a day or two). While DDLs are great for just-released TV episodes, I got tired of juggling captchas/free limits in Jdownloader and it seems any show/episode over two weeks old has been nuked.

Had a PIA VPN account to move Netflix around and have used it to do some initial exploration into torrents. Unfortunately, my current ISP has a 250gb primetime cap (from 5pm to 1am) so leaving torrents up 24/7 on my own box was going to be problematic. Started looking at seedboxes yesterday, but Whatbox.ca's $15 NL flex plan was sold out. Came back available this morning, so I grabbed one (if anyone was waiting for their US boxes, those just came back into availability this morning as well). Should let me drop Netflix, keep good ratios on private trackers and just download what I want off the box during non-prime hours.

Mostly a TV/movie guy, so IPTorrents seems like it'd be a good catch-all private tracker to start with- if anyone has an extra invite I'd appreciate it if you could shoot me a PM (edit: IPT invite longer necessary). Would also be interested in the more specific trackers (BTN, What, PTP, etc), but those seem a bit more valuable these days and I don't have references yet.

PM me your email address, I have a couple IPT invites available at the moment

Does anyone know of a good way to determine the "sweet spot" in utorrent. What I'm finding is that my utorrent download speeds are amazing (for me at least, around 4MB/s), but I'm finding that other devices have trouble connecting and staying on the network while I'm downloading. Sometimes my router will crap out and restart itself, like I'm killing it with too much throughput (DIR-655 FYI).

I've limited the number of connections to 75, lowered max upload to 200kb/s. I haven't limited the download because I notice even if the download speed is a lot lower (say 500kb/s) I still have the same problem.

Any ideas?

My last resort is considering upgrading my router, although I really don't want to because I love it.

I could never find a sweet spot, which was a big reason why I got a seedbox. Got tired of my wife yelling from upstairs while she was on our laptop or tablet "IS OUR INTERNET OUT?!?" when she couldn't get any bandwith at all. I was having to reboot my router multiple times a day. Got tired of that shit.

I've got the DIR-655 as well, and I never have any of these issues ever, and I seed a few torrents constantly, and download every once in a while. Haven't restarted my router in a very long time, and never have internet troubles.

I assume you are all on the latest firmware for the router?

I just don't get how all 3 of you can have issues, and I never do.

Does disabling DHT have anything to do with it? IPT recommends that, so I did it. Not sure if that would have anything to do with problems though.

Yes latest firmware, not sure on DHT.

Noodleface_sl said:

Yes latest firmware, not sure on DHT.

Click to expand...

It's a uTorrent setting that IPT recommends disabling to prevent tracking errors. People with it enabled were not getting credit for uploads, or something. Has had no effect on my speeds that I can see.

I should say that I never had this problem before, seems to have cropped up lately. I did have to reset my router settings after I did some network stress testing stuff at school for a networking project (100,000 simultaneous connections). Perhaps something in the defaults is shitty. I might see if port-forwarding is still enabled, although I'm not entirely sure that would help - I've always set it up before and I run everything in my apartment on static IPs. I generally don't care, but of course while I'm downloading shit is the one moment in the day where my wife wants to check her email on her tablet and freaks out because "the internet is down!!!!"

Vvoid_sl said:

As I mentioned in (I think) another thread, are you limiting your upload speed? If you let that max out, you won't be able to download shit.

Click to expand...

Yes I always limit it, currently at 200kb/s, I guess I could lower it more as my download speed seems pretty high.

Also consider the combo of your upload/download speed. Say you have an internet connection that is 10mbps down and 2mpbs up

If you allow your upload to run at 1mbps, then that's basically chewing up half of your available bandwith. If you are then allowing your download to max out at 5, then you're done, that's all of it. On the vast majority of home internet services, you can have 1 side running at 100% and leave nothing for the other side, or both sides at 50% adds up to maxing out your bandwith as well. I'd say a decent rule of thumb would be to limit each side to 1/4 or less of your max bandwith, if you still want to be able to web browse while torrents are running.

Also remember, your internet service provider is giving you speeds generally in megaBITS, while your torrent program is probably measuring in kiloBYTES/megaBYTES(standard measuring unit for file sizes). So take your advertised speed (10mbps), divide it by 8(you're now at 1.25 megaBYTES) then cut that in like 1/4 (you're now at like 300kbps). Same with upload. If you have 5mbps up, divide that by 8 then divide by 4, puts you at like 150kbps.

So a 10mbps down/5mbps up internet connection would be 50% chewed up by allowing 300Kbps download and 150Kbps upload

And ALL of this is assuming you even get your advertised speeds from your ISP.

Christ, we all need Google Fiber

So what the hell am I doing so different on my stock, latest firmware DIR-655 that I limit nothing, and am just fine, all the time?

Granted, my internet is advertised 150 down, 30 up, but still.

That could be it right there, I don't know what country you live in but that is faster than what 99.99% of Americans have in their home. By a lot. I've got a faster internet connection than every single person I know, and I'm only at 50/5, which fortunately I tend to actually get, if not even a little better.

Peasants ...






Getting back on point, you should also try reducing your maximum number of connections (your router might not be able to handle that many). Not sure what the default is, but try halving that and do a quick test.

joeboo_sl said:

That could be it right there, I don't know what country you live in but that is faster than what 99.99% of Americans have in their home. By a lot. I've got a faster internet connection than every single person I know, and I'm only at 50/5, which fortunately I tend to actually get, if not even a little better.

Click to expand...

Lol, I'm in USA. Phoenix Arizona. It's Cox's top package. $100 a month, but since I don't have cable TV, I feel it's worth it.

Cad_sl said:

Haha, what the fuck dude, no.

Click to expand...

Care to elaborate and attempt to provide something useful?

Which is awesome in theory, but I've never seen my cable modem work properly like that. I can max out my connection either up or down to my seedbox when FTPing a file, and maxing either up or down absolutely kills all other internet access on my network.

If I'm downloading a 20gig blu-ray movie at 50mbps on my desktop(wired), it pushes my dropcam completely offline(uploads over wireless), and if I upload to my FTP server at 5mbps, nobody is getting any internet surfing done, nothing works.

I've been with the same ISP/cable company (Time Warner) for 15 years, and I've never, ever been able to max both my upload and download simultaneously in real-life usage. Generally if one direction is maxed, the other can't get anything through.

Now that I think about it, I wish there was a speedtest-type site around that pushed both upload and download bandwith simultaneously, that would be interesting.