Whirlpool

Hello everyone and let me start by saying thank you for the time that you spend replying to this thread.

Ok first some background information, i have just recently churned over from Iinet (Fantastic service however not enough quota) to Spin as of yesterday.

I can stream youtube fine and direct downloading is fine as i achieve normal speeds arround 140-150 as i am on a 1500/256 line with Spin.

However when i begin to download torrents i never achieve normal speeds averaging around 30kb which is well below par.

I have forwarded the port and I use the latest version of Utorrent which has a green status symbol saying that the network is ok.

Now, 1 day before the churn when i was still using IInet i was achieving normal speeds well in excess of 100 kb/s per second.

Now i am not achieving anywhere near this speed. I have read several threads on slow download speeds and I have yet to find the problem with my connection as I only receive slow torrent speeds.

For my connection i have limited
Maximum connections: 100
Peers: 50
2 active downloads/uploads at a time.

As my iinet service was running run with torrents a day before the churn and now its complete crap to say the least, i am frustrated and happy that i only signed up for 6 months with Spin. At the current rate the 150 gig special plan they gave me with my ADSL 1 service is complete useless as i cant download anywhere near that amount with these slow speeds.

I should also mention my sync speeds are normal
1536/256kb/s so there is nothing wrong with the connection.
and i have also read another spin thread relating to torrents and as such have deleted Avast Antivirus software as instructed. This has not fixed the problem however.

Please provide your insights into my problem.

Recap:
Youtube – perfect
Online Gaming – perfect
Direct Http: downloads perfect
Torrents: SLOW!!!!!

Thanks again for your help.

Comcen/Spin don't do anything to shape your torrents, always use a random port when you set up your torrent client and if you really think the ISP is doing packet inspection to shape or your torrent speeds then encrypt the packets.

The real issue however is the seed to leech ratio and total number of seeds. On a public tracker these are always low and you'll get unpredictable speeds. Do yourself a favour and sign up with some private trackers. My adsl2+ service with comcen will run flat chat maxing out my 8meg bandwidth with private trackers. This is evidence enough for me that its not our ISPs doing causing your poor torrent speeds.

You can guarantee slower speeds on Spin than iiNet. I came from a 6-8mbit connection speed on iinet and I could see 200k a second from a single overseas seeder. I get around a 17mbit connection speed on Spin. The highest speeds seeders through Spin will be Aussie users. Overseas traffic is simply much slower (thanks Optus). Can I sustantiate my claims scientifically? No, as I don't have both connections to compare against.

However I was on iiNet for long enough to know my speeds from certain private tracker sites with a regular bunch of users and I don't see anything like the speeds I used to. What I do get is lots of download quota for a much cheaper price, so it's the price I don't pay for a trade-off. Usenet is quite fast though. You can buy a subscription to a pay site with some of the money you save :-) Casual use plans can suppliment torrent usage for some of the low source files.

What will also slow you down further as well is if you don't limit your uploads. With a 256k upload bandwidth, try limiting at around 24-27k and that should improve things. It did affect iiNet as well, just that it didn't seem to be as much. That assessment is a more subjective statement on my part however.

James B. writes...

What will also slow you down further as well is if you don't limit your uploads. With a 256k upload bandwidth, try limiting at around 24-27k

to expand on that a little, your upload should be limited to no more than roughly 70% IMHO.

for example if you have 256kbps upload then in utorrents "global bandwidth limiting" section set the "maximum upload rate(kb/s)" to something like 17.

dgodz writes...

your upload should be limited to no more than roughly 70% IMHO.

for example if you have 256kbps upload then in utorrents "global bandwidth limiting" section set the "maximum upload rate(kb/s)" to something like 17.

Yeah, that's what I meant to say! My example was plain wrong – too high a limit would have had no effect at all. My excuse is that I'm mathematically challenged in the mornings (or more likely the lack of sleep in the evenings).

Bt doesn't work well on Comcen cause they use Optus. Its just a case of which you prefer: high download limit but poor speeds or good speeds but lower limit.

I never seem to have a issue reaching my quota..

Seriously if HTTP is fast, whats the problem?

wasas writes...

Seriously if HTTP is fast, whats the problem?

This might help:

/forum-replies.cfm?t=1045597#r1

i dont see how making me RE-read the thread is needed, unless your one of those people who sit there and watch your torrent speeds every second and need to make sure your pirate material comes down as fast as possible so you dont get caught.

torrents are slow, deal with it

wasas writes...

unless your one of those people who sit there and watch your torrent speeds every second and need to make sure your pirate material comes down as fast as possible so you dont get caught.

I lol'ed ;)

wasas writes...

i dont see how making me read the thread is needed,

Sorry. I'll point my gun at someone else's head and make them read threads against their will...

Youtube – perfect
Online Gaming – perfect
Direct Http: downloads perfect
Torrents: SLOW!!!!!
Same deal.. I rarely see my torrents over 100K down, would love to know why.. every other isp ive been with has been fine.

sempty45 writes...

ecap:
Youtube – perfect
Online Gaming – perfect
Direct Http: downloads perfect
Torrents: SLOW!!!!!

I have exactly the same problem, im on 8192/384 and il only get like 30k/sec from torrents.
I found a solution though, USENET.....always max speed no waiting or uploading.

always 900k/sec for me, il never use torrents again

tvolke writes...

Torrents: SLOW!!!!!

Can anyone recommend a good Usenet provider?

The Master writes...

Can anyone recommend a good Usenet provider?

Astraweb or Usenet-news have both been great for me

Usenet-news is great, had no problems with them.

thanks guys, will look into them.

If you set Utorrent's max upload speed to 6k/sec or lower, it automatically limits your downloads to 30k/sec behind the scenes.

i always get full speed torrents on my 8mps connection.
Torrents are fast

I was able to get 1mb/sec from torrents, but over the past fortnight it has also come to a crawl at 30-32kb/sec even getting things from very well seeded torrents.

It seems odd that I'm getting roughly the same speed that the OP is getting.

yep seems like they are throttling torrent speeds
over the last few days we can only get a max of 70 – 90 kbs on a individual torrent last week we were getting 230 – 270 on the same sort

I got 450kbs on a torrent this morning, and that was during peak. Considering I only get a sync of around 7-8mbps I think that's an adequate enough speed.

Of course, everyone is going to get different speeds on torrents, but they're supposed to be the type of thing that is set and forget. Queue a few up and come back when completed.

If you want to suck up all your bandwidth use Usenet, or ftp sites.

Hi – when I joined Spin months & months ago I noticed immediately the exact same problem. Torrents would average 20-40kb/sec.

The usual suspects blamed my settings, phoneline, modem, modem settings, etc, anything to deflect blame from the most likely source. I complained bitterly in the forums, but of course that made no real difference, nor did playing around with settings & modems etc ;)

The truth is that Spin is SLOW, especially on Torrents. Slow torrents will waste a lot more bandwidth due to overheads, for one thing you'll be uploading for much longer. So the big download limits from budget ISPs actually cost you more, since you have to waste more of it.

Spin are no longer cheap enough to justify such poor network performance. A budget ISP shouldn't charge more than a quality one such as Internode.

Well I'm finally back with my old ISP, and its amazing what a difference it makes – mildly popular torrents always run at >140kb/sec (1500k) rather than the 20-40kb/sec of Spin/Comcen. I even get these speeds if I throttle my upload to 8kb/sec. Lastly, I also seem to be able to get far more downloaded than with Spin – presumably because a faster torrent is more efficient.

All I can say is that rejoining my old ISP has immediately and significantly improved performance regardless of any settings.

(While you are stuck on Spin, you should try the PIPE (Australian) only filter for utorrent, which lets you download for free to a point with Spin – also using this PIPE filter will on occasion give better speeds if there are enough Australian users. Just ride out your time with Spin and then move onto a better quality ISP – and don't make the same mistake twice of going for budget ISP/larger downloads)