200MB Virgin Broadband but torrents are downloading at 8 KiB/S

54and56 · 25-05-2016 12:30PM #1

Before anyone makes an assumption I'm not doing anything illegal or downloading any illegal content, ok?

I have confirmed 200mb (average 170mb) download speed from Virgin but no matter what content I try to download via qBittorrent I'm only able to achieve +/- 8 KiB/S which is pathetic.

Any suggestions as to whether this is a hardware/software or network (Virgin!!) problem?

54and56 · 25-05-2016 12:40PM

^^^ Mods, please feel free to delete. I found a thread discussing the technical challenges of getting torrents working.

degsie · 25-05-2016 12:44PM

Try d/l a Ubuntu distro via bittorrent here and see what speeds you get. You know that the more seeds you have the better the download speed, right?

54and56 · 25-05-2016 12:58PM

degsie wrote: »

Try d/l a Ubuntu distro via bittorrent here and see what speeds you get. You know that the more seeds you have the better the download speed, right?

Thanks Degsie.

I do know the higher the number of seeders the faster/better will be the download. A recent file I tried downloading had 50 seeders and only 10 leechers but 8 KiB/S was still the max I was getting and that was over an extended period of 6 hours.

I just tried downloading the Ubuntu distro as you suggested and it's scraping along at less than 4 KiB/S

See

Alun · 25-05-2016 01:04PM

Going by that sceenshot you have the upload and download speed limits set to 10KiB/s (figure between []'s)

Plus there's a newer version 3.3.4 out.

54and56 · 25-05-2016 01:46PM

Alun wrote: »

Going by that sceenshot you have the upload and download speed limits set to 10KiB/s (figure between []'s)

Well that's embarassing. Don't recall setting any speed limits in the app. Will go through the settings and remove those and any other constraints that might be in there.

Thanks.

25-05-2016 02:09PM

wally79 wrote: »

I think the file you are downloading may contradict your first post

Quick, lock him up and throw away the key....

bonzodog2 · 25-05-2016 02:16PM

You might be better off using a separate torrent for each episode. I think UPC used to do 'traffic shaping' which restricted torrent speed, not sure if still true.

54and56 · 25-05-2016 02:18PM

wally79 wrote: »

I think the file you are downloading may contradict your first post

Ah, it's only a test.

No, it's a mis labelled file.

No its........

FAILSAFE 00 · 25-05-2016 02:19PM

You wouldn't download a car..

Cactusmania · 25-05-2016 02:26PM

Sometimes, there are limits on the speed you can download from certain sites, regardless of how fast your own connection is.
Dailymotion, for example, seems to cap around the 120kb/s mark for downloading.

Alun · 25-05-2016 02:48PM

There's nothing wrong with that torrent, it downloaded at between 20 and 25MByte/s at the moment here on my Virgin 240Mbit/s connection. The Ubuntu ISO maxed out my connection too.

What do you get when you do a Speedtest?

AndersLimpar · 25-05-2016 03:03PM

Je_suis_Jean wrote: »

Sorry for going off but I posted this in the grilling thread and it may get lost there.

You said you were happy with the Broil Master grill. Are you still happy?

I'm in the same boat and had narrowed it down to the Weber Spirit E210 but after seeing your post I'm thinking about the Broil King Royal 320 instead. Same price as the Weber but has three burners and the reviews seem good for it. Would you still buy the same one or go back to the Weber? Are there many accessories available for the Broil King?

Sorry again for going off topic!!

54and56 · 25-05-2016 03:26PM

Alun wrote: »

There's nothing wrong with that torrent, it downloaded at between 20 and 25MByte/s at the moment here on my Virgin 240Mbit/s connection. The Ubuntu ISO maxed out my connection too.

What do you get when you do a Speedtest?

Hi Alun,

I'm getting very good speeds, 150mb down and 20mb up.

See this test which I just ran

54and56 · 25-05-2016 03:32PM

AndersLimpar wrote: »

Sorry for going off but I posted this in the grilling thread and it may get lost there.

You said you were happy with the Broil Master grill. Are you still happy?

I'm in the same boat and had narrowed it down to the Weber Spirit E210 but after seeing your post I'm thinking about the Broil King Royal 320 instead. Same price as the Weber but has three burners and the reviews seem good for it. Would you still buy the same one or go back to the Weber? Are there many accessories available for the Broil King?

Sorry again for going off topic!!

No worries Anders, I stopped following that thread as it had become very specialised and dominated by a few guys who seem obsessed with BBQ'ing. Imagine having three different types of BBQ's and spending 10 hours smoking meat etc. Not for me!!

The short answer to your question is "Yes". It's a quality BBQ and I think much better value than the equivalent Weber. In fact I think it's better. I really like the way the Broil Kings have included an adapted floor under the BBQ specially to hold the Irish size (oversize) gas cylinders. Weber can't be ar$ed doing that so even though they have a cabinet for holding the gas cylinder it's too small and you end up with your cylinder sitting in the open air beside the BBQ and the storage space under the BBQ empty.

Weber is a more respected premium brand but the Broil King is very well built, very well designed, looks the business and cooks very well.

Can't really comment on the accessories as I haven't looked to buy any.

Hope that helps.

Alun · 25-05-2016 03:43PM

What are your connection and BitTorrent settings? Also what's your network setup router / modem wise?

ED E · 25-05-2016 04:03PM

I'm guessing your hard drive is really really really sh1t/busy.

Those spikes in the graph are a strong sign that the disk is thrashing, you're downloading loads, disk says "hey hold on, cant keep up", client backs off, disk catches up, rinse repeat.

maki · 25-05-2016 06:05PM

You see that little icon at the bottom of the window that looks like a speedometer? Click it.

It's currently pointing to the left, which is intentionally limiting your speeds.

bonzodog2 · 25-05-2016 07:27PM

Or try utorrent

Alun · 25-05-2016 07:33PM

maki wrote: »

You see that little icon at the bottom of the window that looks like a speedometer? Click it.

It's currently pointing to the left, which is intentionally limiting your speeds.

No it isn't, not necessarily. The arrow pointing to the left means it's using the Alternative Rate Limits, whatever they are. If those are disabled, i.e. unchecked, in the settings, then there are effectively no limits. If there were a limit set for these, it is displayed in square brackets next to the current d/l and u/l speeds.

EDIT: I know it shows those limits in the original screenshot, but the OP said he'd disable all the speed limits, so in theory it shouldn't make any difference. It is entirely possible he's disabled only the global rate limit but kept the alternative one and not selected the global rate with the icon, I'll give you that!

Alun · 25-05-2016 07:35PM

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Or try utorrent

...and get deluged in ads and other crap, not to mention all kinds of rubbish that gets installed along with it if you're not very careful.

I recently switched from utorrent to qBittorrent myself, and it's like a breath of fresh air.

jca · 25-05-2016 07:41PM

Alun wrote: »

...and get deluged in ads and other crap, not to mention all kinds of rubbish that gets installed along with it if you're not very careful.

I recently switched from utorrent to qBittorrent myself, and it's like a breath of fresh air.

I use uTorrent myself and find it very good. I installed it using patch my pc which stopped any crapware being installed with it.

Alun · 25-05-2016 07:57PM

I find qbittorrent every bit as good myself. It seems to manage disk writes much better than utorrent in my experience, even with multiple large torrents downloading simultaneously.

25-05-2016 08:08PM

I'm using Deluge on Mac and Window's, nice little client....

54and56 · 26-05-2016 12:07AM

ED E wrote: »

I'm guessing your hard drive is really really really sh1t/busy.

Those spikes in the graph are a strong sign that the disk is thrashing, you're downloading loads, disk says "hey hold on, cant keep up", client backs off, disk catches up, rinse repeat.

I think you're right. I'm writing to a 128gb SD card in an i7 Win 10 laptop with a 128gb SSD.

ED E · 26-05-2016 12:11AM

Je_suis_Jean wrote: »

I think you're right. I'm writing to a 128gb SD card in an i7 Win 10 laptop with a 128gb SSD.

If its UHS1/2 or C10 it should manage it for a bit, but over long period the NAND will get pretty hot.

uT has a "Disk Overloaded x%" dialog at the bottom, not sure if your client has an equivalent.

Alun · 26-05-2016 09:07AM

An easy way to find out then would be to set the download directory to the SSD temporarily and see if that solves the problem. Also double check that you haven't still got a download limit set by mistake.

qBittorrent doesn't have a "disk overloaded" message on the status bar like uTorrent does, but using a conventional fast HDD, I used to get regular periods of intensive disk thrashing with uTorrent when downloading multiple large torrents, and don't get that with qBittorrent.

Another thing that qBittorrent doesn't have unfortunately is a simple way to move completed torrent files to another directory when completed. That would have been a possible solution if the SD card does indeed turn out to be the problem, i.e. download to SSD and move to the SD card when complete.

54and56 · 26-05-2016 10:39AM

Alun wrote: »

An easy way to find out then would be to set the download directory to the SSD temporarily and see if that solves the problem. Also double check that you haven't still got a download limit set by mistake.

Thanks Alun, I'll do that ref the SSD next time I'm D/L'ing something and see what impact if any it makes. I have definitely turned off all download limits, as far as I can tell anyway.

See

BTW, is there an optimum port I should set? ATM the default port of 8999 is set.

Alun · 26-05-2016 11:31AM

I use a random port and have UPNP enabled. You should probably also enable uTP protocol too.

BTW if you do set the download location to your SSD, once the torrent is completed you can right click on it and select "set location..." and specify a location on your SD card to easily move the torrent and continue to seed it. Other clients have the ability to do this automatically for all torrents, but qBittorrent doesn't unfortunately.

54and56 · 26-05-2016 06:09PM

Thanks Alun, I'll give that a go.

200MB Virgin Broadband but torrents are downloading at 8 KiB/S

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