Cogeco → Re: [Eastern Ontario] [Peterborough] Torrent upload issues

Well, pretty much any fansubbed anime torrent has always worked properly for me, and I was only bell as of last week on wednesday, was the day I moved out here, so very much recently. I dunno how the mods here would look at torrents of unlicensed fansubbed anime, as it is legal, but you never know how some places may react, so I'll just PM some.

Okay, I took those two torrents you sent me and I'm getting about 250 kB/s down on each on them... and after bout 10 mins I'm doing about 90 kB/s up (my cap is set to 100), between the two, similar to the same speeds you were getting on Bell.

I also tried them in St. Catharines as well, just in case there's any credence to this area of high population conspiracy theory, and had exactly the same results.

This at least verifies that you are experiencing some sort of problem...

Just for kicks, have you tested without your router?

See, the thing with me is that the "shaping" goes off and on. I've tested this with friends. At one point I cannot upload to any, other times I do it full speed.

I did, though only briefly since results should only become apparent after 10 mins or so, and it works out the same. So, I guess in my situation at least, it's boiling down to calling up Cogeco and seeing what they can figure out, since it would appear that most people must not be configured properly if you were getting good speeds on both. Well, at least it's encouraging to know that much of this conspiracy isn't valid, heh. I wonder if perhaps it has to do with age of equipment, or some other physical thing... I'll call em up on thursday or friday and see what they have to say.

*EDIT*: Now that I'm back home and checked the torrent performance stats, I averaged 22k/sec down and 12k/sec on each of those torrents, just to give an idea of the speeds I'm getting, which are actually better than the first bunch I'd downloaded last friday. Didn't take 24h to seed out to my ratio settings, heh. So here's hoping that maybe it's just some glitch that cogeco can and is willing to fix.

A couple more suggestions.

- Speeds should be fine without messing around with transport encryption, in fact a lot of technically illiterate users blindly enable it. If you must have it on, be sure to enable both fallbacks's as shown in the attached image.

- With Azureus, make sure you have the latest Sun JRE (6u2), and make sure all previous versions have been completely removed. There were previous old versions that caused slowdown issues.

- If you have the RAM and a powerful enough system, crank up the disk cache under Performance Options to 32MB, check off "Perform read-aheads to reduce disk reads when uploading"

- Under Queue there's a few options for simultaneous downloads and active torrents. I generally adjust this based on my use, as there is a "sweet spot" which is discussed on the Azureus wiki. Putting these to 0 can cause negative performance on any ISP if you have a large number of torrents, with a large number of seeds/peers open.

Also, have you adjusted any of the "Advanced Network Settings" (perhaps when you were with Bell), that should be put to default?

Also, have you in the past adjusted any of your Windows TCP/IP settings, like your receive Window, or any suggestions suggested in those silly tweak tools?

Well, I'd had encryption off initially, but experienced the poor speeds, so as per believing in the azureus wiki, I turned it on to level 2 (by their description, leaving both fall backs on) and using RC4 as my system can handle it.

Hadn't looked into the most recent java updates, though the auto updater ran not too long ago, I'll check what version I've got. In fact, this has always been something I've wondered, when you look in add/remove programs, it's got a few entires for sun java with various version numbers, it's ok to uninstall the older ones? Normally, I'd just give it a shot and see what happens, but I've been a bit lazy on that one, and I had actually forgot about it heh

I've changed the cache and read ahead options now, also I guess I ought to mention my system has an athlon xp 2500+ @ 1.87GHz with 2 gigs of ram (not too shabby, but I need to do upgrading soon..) with an on-board 100mbps NIC by 3com. (motherboard is asus a7n8x DX, can you tell I put this thing together myself? heh)

As for max torrents and simultaneous downloading, I've also set max to 0 and had simultaneous down set to 4 and never had any trouble.

Never touched advanced network settings on bell, just the default values which are, for me (in order from top to bottom on the version noted at top), 8, blank, 0, 1492, 0, 0, blank

And no, I know enough about networking that tweaking those values does not really effect you internet experience in any appreciable way, and will more than likely just cause problems in the future. The only thing I'd done to my tcp/ip settings in the past was to manually configure the network at home as we'd had two PCs and I wanted to ensure the right machine kept the right IP for forwarding reasons, but since coming here I only have one machine, and so I've changed it back to manually obtain IP settings.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried downloading with another system in your house? You have a friend in this area with a laptop?Drop that down to Plain - it's not about your system handling it, you're limiting yourself to only accepting RC4 encryptions and unencrypted. You want to be able to communicate with everyone across the board, and setting the minimum to Plain with fallback ensures you'll connect to unencrypted, plain and RC4 connections.Yes, for sure, kill them all (except the latest). If you don't have the latest, kill them all then install that.3COM builds a decent chipset that typically supports most features, so that shouldn't be a problem.Your MTU should be 1500. 1492 is for PPoE connections.

As for friends with a laptop, I'll try that when one comes by, I do have some but working all week doesn't leave much time for hanging out, heh. I set the MTU properly, and adjusted the encryption to plain, and removed all the older java versions. I also re-ran the network setup wizard, assuming that perhaps some settings in there may have still been set for PPoE instead of cable, and I'll reboot the machine shortly to see if I get any results on these changes.

Anyhow, Artemiskun, any progress or anything to report on your end? I'm anxious to hear how things are or are not going... !

As of yet, nothing really has changed. I have noticed though that at night, it seems to run much better. Could be just a larger influx of lucky peers on the torrents I've been running, or maybe it has to do with traffic somewhere along the line, or times, I really am not sure. Haven't rebooted yet though, but I don't see that really having a major effect. I'm going to call up cogeco in the morning and see what they have to say, but at this rate, it's likely I'm going to move to bell or some other provider in the area, because I don't feel like paying for a secureix account on top of what I'm already paying for cable (yes, I know there're free accounts, but 256kbps is no good news), and seeding for 20 hours is just murder for only 175 meg files.

Especially so, now that I have noticed that bell seems to have upgraded it's service around here. Apparently the total internet performance package gives up to 7mbps and I could have sworn just last week it wasn't that high.. and that's what I'm paying for cogeco and only 5mbps max (along with all this headache). I think I'm gonna go to bell world tomorrow, sadly, and see what they have handy...

Unfortunately, I think we've gone as far as we can without me seeing your system. I wish I could encounter these same problems and try to work through it, or see it for myself, however all my friends on Cogeco in St. Catharines, Stoney Creek and Niagara Falls are rocking on torrents, as am I.

Yeah, I know. I think it's likely more of a regional thing than anything else. Could be that niagara is still unafflicted, and come to think of it, when I was still working as a dealer at radioshackThe Source, I had heard rumours that rogers might be moving in up here, so that might actually have something to do with it, and would make sense, since it's been confirmed for quite some time that rogers does indeed shape p2p traffic.

Well, if you do switch over, send me an update and let me know how it went.

Or, if you ever get a chance to test on a buddy's laptop, just for kicks.

You might also want to look into using newsgroups - Cogeco has a really decent 6-day retention newsgroup. Google grabit, setup news.cogeco.ca and check out binsearch to search for binaries.

Hi Artemiskun

I just wanted to let you know that I live in Peterborough and am on the Pro package. I use micro torrent with no issues uploading beyond 10K. I also find that micro torrent uses less resources than the download client you are using. It might be worth you giving it a try.