Can I get a hand from a torrent fiend?

[Mercutio]

OK, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only person who uses bittorrent, here.
Maybe I am. Whatever.

Anyway, one of my customers keeps telling me bittorrent on her machine is broken. I RDP into her machine, and sure enough, torrents I can see that're well-seeded are downloading at like 1kb/sec.

I check her router and XP's firewall, and everything is good. She even has torrent ports forwarded to her desktop machine from her router.

I start a torrent on a site I use - demonoid.com, and it goes just fine. 50kb/sec after a couple minutes. Looks good. I close my RDP session and tell her it must just be the things she's downloading.

She emails me a bit later: She's started another torrent from torrentspy, one that has dozens of seeders and almost no one downloading, and her speed is STILL 1kb/sec.

OK... I suggest that she try a different client (switch bittornado for bitComet).

Still 1kb/sec.

So *I* try downloading some things from Torrentspy to my desktop here.
I pick three files. One is a well seeded movie. One is a comedy album. One is a collection of comic books. All have more seeders than leechers and since I torrent from work from time to time (usually to grab Linux .iso files), I know our firewall is set up right and right now, there isn't anyone else here to use any of our bandwidth.
The movie starts downloading at 1 - 3kb/sec. The comic books start downloading at 1 - 8kb/sec. The comedy album (one of the things my customer was grabbing) jumps between 5 and 15kb/sec. All three tend toward the low end of their respective ranges.
To make sure I'm not insane, I download something from another site. ~25kb/sec. That seems just fine to me.

I'd like to say at this point that the problem is just torrentspy.

But before I do that, can someone with a little bit of free time and a kind of fast internet connection download something from torrentspy. I'd just like to know if you can get a decent transfer rate or if maybe there's some kind of problem with that particular tracker.

 

[P5-133XL]

I've never used the program but I have noticed ISP's (Especially cable systems that have limited up-speeds) that will limit BW availiable for specific applications like WinMX. My solution has been to change the default port number. Is that possible on bit-torrent?

 

[Mercutio]

Yup, but right now I'm on the same cable segment she is, and neither of us are having problems with torrent sites. If there was a port assignment issue I think it would affect any tracker we tried to connect to, not just one in particular.

The way bittorrent works is that there's a central site, called a tracker, that maintains a list of all the clients that are trying to download a particular torrent. All those clients (called "seeders" if they have the whole file, or "leechers" if they're still collecting pieces) talk to the tracker to get the IP addresses of other clients, and to make download or upload requests from them. The tracker doesn't store the file at all; only the clients. Your ability to download is USUALLY based on how fast you can upload in return, but speeds can be staggering if a particular torrent is well-seeded. I've seen 1.2Mbit downloads a couple times.
Each torrent running on your PC is assigned a TCP port, normally in the 6680 - 6690 range, and each remote client for that set of files communicates with you though that port. Some clients automatically use random ports or move the port assignments around from the standard.

Bittorrent traffic is said to account for something like 30% of the traffic on the internet.

 

[P5-133XL]

My next suggestion is to re-tweak her network settings. I've seen applications optimize them for dial-up modems causing large scale speed problems.

 

[Groltz]

Ok Merc, here's my questions:

Is she getting her torrent files from membership-only sites? If you get a torrent that belongs to a membership site and you're not a member, they can cut you off via IP recognition. Tell her to try getting one from The Pirate Bay or another non-regulated site.

Is she using a leecher-mod BT client?? These exist, and if the tracker you're connected to recognizes it as such, it will cut you off. Leecher-modded clients give a fake UL/DL ratio to the tracker for you, thus resulting in faster speeds.

BT clients do have adjustable upload/download settings in the options. Did she mess with her settings?

The obvious one, sources, or lack thereof. How many seeds + peers does the torrent have that she's DL'ing?

Upload pipe saturation. Has she set her upload rate so high that it has crimped off her overall bandwidth? For instance, if you set your BT client's upload bandwidth too high for your connection speed, it will cause the download to suffer along with internet browsing, etc. Does she have any other apps sucking bandwidth on her machine? I found, when I still had 256KBps-UP that I had to limit the P2P upload bandwidth to 21Kbps or face saturation problems.

Time. Some torrents take an hour or so to kick in and start coming down the pipe.

Tell her to try Bit Tornado. Azureus also is good but it requires Java JRE to function and is a bit of a resource hog. Awesome configurability, though.

Good Luck.

 

[Mercutio]

She's on 6/1Mbit cable, same as me. She is using maybe 5k/sec of that with her open torrents (or she was last time I looked) + whatever she's doing with Firefox, which probably isn't much. She's spyware and virus free - we've already been through THAT mess. I verified with Trend's housecall scan this morning.
I configured her router for her. I know that's right.

She was using standard Bittornado when she started complaining. I asked her to try BitComet. I know the standard Bittorrent client and Azureus are dog-slow in comparison.

She's pretty much only hitting torrentspy.com - which AFAIK is public torrents only, and in the past she's said her downloads have been OK. Only the last couple of *weeks* have her torrents dropped to nothing.

She had BitTornado's caps set for "Fast Cable" - she said that if she didn't, web browsing got too slow. I tried resetting it to the (uncapped) defaults and restarting but of course that didn't help. She's using BitComet now with just default settings.

The stuff she is downloading is either current Hollywood releases with good numbers of seeders (e.g. Wedding Crashers, with 490 seeders and 524 leechers. Her download speed is between 0 and 2kb/sec), or Albums that are mostly better than 1:1 seeder to leecher. In short, things that should NOT be slow.

And I'm seeing the same thing. Just from torrentspy, though. Piratebay is fine. Demonoid (which is a member-only site) is fine.

All this has me thinking that the problem is Torrentspy and not Bittorrent.

 

[Bozo]

How do set bittorrent up on your PC?

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

Download a client. I like BitComet, myself, but BitTornado is supposed to be the fastest.

The client takes the association for .torrent files.

Visit a site that hosts trackers, like TorrentSpy or the Pirate Bay or Demonoid.com or...

Click on a link to a .torrent file.

 

[ddrueding]

Merc,

I just went to torrentspy and grapped a torrent at random. Within 10 seconds it was stable @ 100Kb/s using azureus.

 

[ddrueding]

Sorry for the miscapitalization.....100kB/s.

 

[sechs]

Sounds like a remote issue. If the folks out in the cloud aren't sending data, there's nothing to receive.

Since most folks have far more download bandwidth than upload, there has to be several times more seeders than leechers to make a torrent move quickly.

 

[Mercutio]

Just so we're clear. Everything I'm trying to download right now has more seeders than leechers. I'm getting jack from anyone I've connected to through torrentspy.

I ssh'd into my home machine (same cable, different segment) and launched some torrents there. Same deal. Demonoid is fine. Torrentspy is teh suck.

Given David's very good result, maybe it's something Comcast is doing here in RedneckLand...

 

[Gilbo]

I actually had similar problems with TorrentSpy in the past. I could never sort them out, so, unfortunately, I can't really help except by providing legitimate sympathy.

I favour mininova these days.

 

[Handruin]

Merc,

I just went to torrentspy and grapped a torrent at random. Within 10 seconds it was stable @ 100Kb/s using azureus.

I did the same... random dowload from torrentspy and I'm getting:

10KB/s D/L on
32 seeds
105 peers
Using Azureus

 

[Mercutio]

Can I get a couple more samples from you, Doug?

10k/sec could be OK with a torrent like that and it could be really slow, too.

Basically, David's are running the way they should be. Gilbo's saying he had the same problems with the same site. Gilbo is certainly someone I'd trust to know what's going on.

 

[Groltz]

Download a client. I like BitComet, myself, but BitTornado is supposed to be the fastest.

The client takes the association for .torrent files.

Visit a site that hosts trackers, like TorrentSpy or the Pirate Bay or Demonoid.com or...

Click on a link to a .torrent file.

...And prepare to be sued for $6,000,000.00 if you're not careful.
Use PeerGuardian-2 to block malicious IP's.

http://methlabs.org/projects/

 

[Mercutio]

... which gets you exactly dick the day they decide to sue the tracker you like into giving up server logs, like they did to lokitorrents and suprnova users.

Still I'd say the odds are 5 million to one or so that any particular user would get sued. I can live with that.

 

[Groltz]

Ok, I went over to TorrentSpy and picked out a torrent to download.

RESULTS

Just finished about 5 minutes ago. It took a little while to kick in but after it did the speeds were decent.

I am on Comcast 6MB Down / 768KB up.

 

[Mercutio]

Gilbo's bad. I'm bad. David is not. Groltz is not. Handruin is in "maybe" land.

Argh.

 

[Handruin]

I'm trying a few more from torrentspy's latest:

peerguardian 2 installed

Sample app #1
between 17KB/s and 27KB/s @ 13 seeds 9 leech
after a minute or two it's up to 45KB/s D/L, but fluctuating badly.

Sample app #2
10 seeds 10 leechers
30KB/s roughly

Sample app #3
13 seeders 1 leechers
between 110KB/s & 185 KB/s

Sample app #4
2 seeders 13 leechers
between 2KB/s & 10 KB/s
40KB/s uploading (which is my configured max)


Keep in mind I don't give two-shits about these applications, I'm only doing download tests. I only ran these for a couple minutes, and never finished the download.

 

[Mercutio]

I'd say those numbers are just fine.
Guess that theory is blown.

Thanks to everyone who did a test, regardless!

 

[ddrueding]

Have you tried using a thicker client? Perhaps there are additional features that permit faster downloads?

 

[Mercutio]

I can't say I've tried recently.
And I can't think of any speed enhancements that Azureus has that BitTornado doesn't.

I've been messing around with the UPnP settings on my router here at home and within BitTornado instead of manually forwarding ports to my annointed bittorrent machine. That hasn't helped, either.

 

[sechs]

What's the number of connected clients versus the seeder/leecher numbers that the tracker hands you?

This sounds like a nothing sent/nothing received situation....

 

[Mercutio]

Right now, I'm supposedly connected to a torrent with 22 seeders, 16 leechers - and I can see 30ish clients on my personal connection list. Total speed is listed as 206kb/sec. I'm downloading a massive 1 kb/sec. It's run all day (about 7 hours) like that. I've downloaded nearly an entire megabyte.

 

[Groltz]

Merc, can you get the same torrent off another site?

 

[Bookmage]

One thing I've learned from torrenting is that speeds are never constant and that you have to be lucky to get anything decent. Torrentspy may or not be the original tracker and you can easily get random torrents that use external trackers. Torrents have many variables and I've gotten various speeds on one torrent as seeds/leechers joined and dropped. I normally use the Bittornado client or Torrentstorm. Make sure you doublecheck the firewall and even try different ports. At my school using wireless, the default ports are blocked and I get better speeds in teh mid 12000-14000 range vs anything else. On Cox cable, I get better speeds in the 30000 range. With piratebay around and irc, I don't use Torrentspy that much since most of Torrentspy uses external trackers.
Also, I've noticed some computers/nics get better results than others... but thats more of an unscientific observation...

One way to test is also to setup your own torrent/tracker and test send a few files between some other people.

 

[timwhit]

Check out mininova.org. I get much better download speeds from there than I have from other sites.

I also use filelist.org which is a membership site, but I consistently get 400KB/s+ on any semi-popular file.

 

[Splash]

Piracy crackdown spurs shift in online file sharing
BitTorrent is out; eDonkey is in

• ...Last year, BitTorrent was consuming up to a third of the Internet's total bandwidth as users traded huge movie and television files. Hollywood struck back with a slew of lawsuits to shut down Web sites that provided "tracker" links, which tell the network where to look for files.
  
  The U.S. has also seen a surprising return to popularity of the Gnutella file-sharing network, which had faded after an earlier crackdown by music companies.

http://www.computerworld.com/govern...10801,104239,00.html?source=NLT_AM&nid=104239

 

[Mercutio]

Blah, blah, blah. Torrents work. Edonkey doesn't.

 

[Groltz]

Emule works exceptionally well for certain items that torrents don't exist for. Some modded client versions are very cool. :mrgrn:
I still use it for about 80% of my P2P. Most of my downloads aren't movies/videos though.

 

[Mercutio]

Personally, I can say that there is very little of anything on the Edonkey network that interests me. And even less that's well-sourced enough that I'm likely to get a complete copy in some reasonable (under a month, say) period of time.

Torrents make up the world of specialized communities. The fact that I can go to ZcultFM and pick up 80% of Marvel's published comic books; that there's a dedicated subgroup of Classical music seeders on a couple sites I visit, or "the land of old and utterly obscure kid's shows" on myspleen.com...
Those are the things that make torrents godly.

Oh, and the ready availability of high quality porn. I'm proud to say I do my part to help the whole world with that one.

 

[e_dawg]

I have been getting poor results with torrentspy of late as well.

For that matter, my WinMX stopped working several months ago. I can see files on the network, but I can never initiate a successful download.

I used to get awesome torrent and WinMX speeds at one point through my 6 Mbit / 800 kbit ADSL connection, so I don't think it's my router config either.

 

[Groltz]

The Pirate Bay was raided by police and had its servers confiscated today.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1203

 

[Mercutio]

http://www.thepiratebay.com/ will be back tomorrow.