BitTorrent question - slow internet browsing

[Marcos]

Heres something i cant quite work out on my own.

I have limited the upload on my torrent client to less than half of my connection's total upload speed. My downloads are limited to a quarter of my connection's download speed.
I only have 1 or 2 torrents active at a time.

Why would my internet browsing slow down to a halt and sometimes stop working completely even though the torrent program is clearly not throttling my connection?

[burble]

Are you sure you've limited your uploads correctly? It would make sense if your upload was maxed out for downloads to be slow as you wouldn't have the bandwidth available to send back the TCP_ACK packets to the remote web server.

I've seen some torrent programs (Utorrent was awful for it) where the upload limit was ignored - install something like dumeter to check the actual throughput.

[Marcos]

ok i've disabled the torrent program's speed limits and i'm using netlimiter instead, which has worked very reliably for me in the past. i'll report back if it is still causing trouble

[Marcos]

ok well its a lot btter but still having a bit of a delay in the initial page loading

[jimbouk]

Are you assuming your total speed is what your modem/router says? I'm on 8meg broadband, says it's connected at 7.5meg, in reality its lower and it fluctuates...

[Marcos]

yeah i factored that. i can consistently get 200KB/s down and 24KB/s up,

so i've set the torrent limit to 100KB/s down and 5KB/s up.

And its still making the browser slow and msn wont connect

don't really get it

[young_one]

Its not really about the speeds at which you are uploading/downloading its the amount of connections you have coming in and out.

You say that you have 1 or 2 torrents running but that might well mean you have 20-100 simultanious connections as the whole technology behind torrents is that you open many conections to multiple sources to aquire the data or to share the data.

Having such a large amount of connections can throttle any router or modem and so even though you are only downloading at 50% of your capacity, using the other 50% can be hard as no new connections cant be made.

[Marcos]

Its not really about the speeds at which you are uploading/downloading its the amount of connections you have coming in and out.

You say that you have 1 or 2 torrents running but that might well mean you have 20-100 simultanious connections as the whole technology behind torrents is that you open many conections to multiple sources to aquire the data or to share the data.

Having such a large amount of connections can throttle any router or modem and so even though you are only downloading at 50% of your capacity, using the other 50% can be hard as no new connections cant be made.

oh ok, and how would i improve the situation? can i increase the number of connections allowed? or limit the torrent program?

[burble]

oh ok, and how would i improve the situation? can i increase the number of connections allowed? or limit the torrent program?

You'd need to limit the number of connections in the torrent client. The number of connections the router can handle would be down to the hardware (and to some extent the firmware) it runs so controlling the connections is a client thing.

[Marcos]

whats the best torrent client to use in this case?

i cant find the relevant option in utorrent

[jackvdbuk]

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9...disable2to.jpg

theres the menu you need

[Marcos]

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9...disable2to.jpg

theres the menu you need

strange, all my limits are set to about 10% of whats on that image

[MadduckUK]

if your using winxp sp2 have you increased the maximum number of connections from 10 to something more suitable?

[chuckskull]

Try turning off DHT. It can really slow down browsing.

[Lourdes]

Download xp-antispy:
http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?opti...irror&itemid=4

Special > Connection limit

[Marcos]

if your using winxp sp2 have you increased the maximum number of connections from 10 to something more suitable?

i'll try it, and i assume this is the program that does the job:

Download xp-antispy:
http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?opti...irror&itemid=4

Special > Connection limit