[WXC/VFX] Torrent traffic capped?

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argada

14 posts

Geek

#35278 8-Jun-2009 01:00

Bare in mind, I'm not on the off-peak torrent plan. I'm on FS up/down flood plan.

Only at 4% data usage this month.

I noticed today, that total torrent download seems to be capped at 10kbps....
speednet shows 4Mbit/s down, 0.8Mbit/s up.... so....xnet is.. shaping all torrent traffic now? (Been like this all day, since around noon, it's now 1am)

I would expect something like this to be done for the off-peak plans, but hey... I'm on a plan where I pay for every MB of data usage. Who are they to judge my torrent traffic to be of lower priority compare to http traffic? I'm paying the same money as everyone else. (Having said that, http traffic is not that fast either.)

Been with xnet for years, I've been willing to put up with the gradual decline in speed but if this latest incident I'm observing is a new policy... I think its time for me to look for a new isp.

8d52797c436

264 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#222589 8-Jun-2009 09:21

I'll start off by saying that I have no idea if this is the case or not, and it may turn out that what I am saying is untrue but...

Last year at university I wrote a really small paper on inferring traffic shaping via port number (a 4 or 5 page paper where the testing and writing up took less than a week). Basically I used a bash script to generate a file every 10 minutes filled with random numbers, uploaded it to a server in America, then timed how long it took to pull the file back down using different port numbers, comparing it against port numbers like http traffic, ssh traffic e.t.c. I also used ping e.t.c. to get an idea of what path the packets were taking to get to the site. What I found is that while the ISP I was using was not blocking the torrent traffic it was slower than other traffic, then the ping results showed that overseas ISP's were actually dropping all traffic that they received on the common torrent ports. You might want to try similar tests to prove that it is Xnet that is doing this to the traffic and not an external source.

Also, if I remember correctly, a lot of torrent programs will slow your download speed relative to your upload speed, so thats another thing to check too.

argada

14 posts

Geek

#222838 8-Jun-2009 22:04

Thanks for your input.

It turned out to be a false alarm. One of the hard drives the torrent client is writing to was in an erroneous state. My guess is all the write to disk operations were silently failing, causing forcing the download to back off.