Bittorrent Bandwidth
From The.forest
Contents |
[edit] Caging the Bittorrent Beast
This article will deal specifically with controlling your bittorrent bandwidth so that it doesn't bring your home network to a crawl. Having lived in a house with other heavy bittorrenters I've quickly learnt the best way to deal with out of control bandwidth leakage, punch the offending party. If you aren't Wolverine then this might not be a good idea.
If you want to try my super special deformed tactic No.2 then read this guide and I guarantee it will help.
[edit] So why is my Home Network so slow?
It's simple maths. Imagine your Internet connection as a pipe, with only so much space. Take my own for instance, 4Mbps download speed, 0.38Mbps upload speed. Don't forget, we are talking kilobits and Megabits here, not bytes. Now, whenever you are using the Internet whether browsing or downloading porn educational Movies there is a constant chatter between the places you access and your Computer. This chatter is the way the server can see what your machine is doing and make the appropriate response. This chatter means that there is data being constantly sent from your Computer. To put it simply it's really important that data can get where it's going.
Bittorrent is a hungry beast and if you let it, it will consume all the bandwidth you give it. The problem with this is that if the upstream bandwidth gets saturated then the network will crawl to a halt. It will also slow down your bittorrent downloads, which of course we want to avoid too.
[edit] How do I keep my upstream bandwidth free?
So if it's important to keep that upstream free, how do we do that? There are several solutions, depending on your setup. Essentially there are two ways to go:
- Software - This is easiest way to go, with support in most p2p programs for controlling the bandwidth used. You can also use system utilities to control the bandwidth your machine uses. I will talk about this later.
- Hardware - This is more expensive, but there are some routers out there which offer QOS (Quality of Service) settings. This will ensure that your p2p traffic doesn't swamp the rest of your network, but it is still important to ensure that the software is behaving properly.
Of the two variables the software is the most important, as not everyone will have routers supporting QoS, so I will concentrate on Software aspects for this article.
[edit] p2p Software
As this article is about Bittorrent and how it can effect your bandwidth I will concentrate on two popular bittorrent clients, Azureus and uTorrent. Of the two I would personally recommend utorrent as it runs much faster than Azureus and doesn't suffer from feature bloat. In other words it does what it says on the tin, and it does it well.
Whichever bittorrent client you use it is important to work out how much upstream bandwidth you can spare for it. I will use my own connection as an example. As I have mentioned my upstream speed is 0.38Mbps. In kB/s (kilobits per second) that's 46.88 kB/s. Now, you would expect that it might be OK to set your upload speed to say three quarters of your upstream max, but through trial and error I've found that this just doesn't work. Bittorrent has it's sweet spot I've found, and in my case that's 15 kB/s. That's 1/3rd of my upstream bandwidth. Importantly that leaves room for other Computers on the network, in case my housemate decides to run bittorrent (another +15 kB/s) and also wants to surf.
I would suggest testing to find your own sweet spot, by tweaking the upstream max upload rate of your bittorrent clients and see ing the overall result.
I would also suggest that you only download or seed one torrent at a time. You will reach a 1 ratio much faster if you just a single torrent at a time, and if you have stuff seeding while downloading then your download will slow down. Also if you download more than one torrent at a time the total bandwidth available will be split between all downloads, therefore if you were downloading 2 then they would download only half as fast, although in most cases they will be even slower than that.
[edit] uTorrent
These are the settings I would recommend for uTorrent.
- Navigate to Options -> Connection and set Global Maximum upload rate (kB/s): to XXX where XXX is about 1/3 to 1/4 your upstream bandwidth. Tweak as necessary.
- Navigate to Options -> Queueing and set Maximum number of active torrents (upload or download): to "1". Set Maximum number of active downloads to "1".
It's also possible to quickly change your upload rate in utorrent in the bottom right of the main window. It should say U: x.xkB/s (total xx.x MB). Right click on this and you can quickly set your upload speed to something else. This is a great way to test and find your sweet spot.
[edit] Azureus
The settings for Azureus are essentially the same, but located in different places.
- Navigate to Tools -> Options -> Transfer and set KB/s global max upload speed [0: unlimited to "15".
- Navigate to Tools -> Options -> Queue and set Max simultaneous downloads to "1" and set Max active torrents to "1".
It is possible to quickly change the upload speed of Azureus by right clicking in the bottom right of the main window and selecting a new value.
[edit] System utilities
One alternate way to control the bandwidth available to your programs is to use a system utility like netlimiter. NetLimiter does what it suggests, controlling how much up and down bandwidth a program may use. The use of this program is outside of the scope of this article, but it's also pretty obvious so little need to dwell on it.
