Multiple Connections (Bit Torrent) causes VERY high latency on DSL connection

[Rainsford]

I have a somewhat interesting networking problem that I hope someone may be able to enlighten me on. When I download something (legal, before anyone asks) with Bit Torrent it seems to "flood" my internet connection even when using relativly little bandwidth compared to the line bandwidth. As in, pinging google.com or the gateway at the ISP gives 3 second response times instead of 50 ms. I know it's not my system that's lagged because it has worked fine on a different internet connection and all the computers on the network have really slow internet access.

Here's how the connection is set up. For a while it was a Broadmax DSL bridge/router job doing the entire show, but it had some problems doing DHCP and the like so I just put the Broadmax into bridge mode and got a Linksys router to do the routing and DHCP and NAT and all that. I have the problem with both setups, which leads me to believe it's the Broadmax doing it, but I can figure out what the problem would be. I don't know if it's an incorrect setting (I can't imagine what it would be) or if the Broadmax is just a pile of crap as a bridge as well as as a router.

I'm really at a loss to even figure out what the problem could be, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I suppose I could just not use bit torrent, but I hate computer problems I can't solve

 

[minendo]

Use the experimental client to throttle your upload speed.

 

[spidey07]

sounds normal to me. When you're using your connection for transfer large files everything gets "backed up" so to speak, especially if you have a small upload

 

[Confused]

Yep, sounds about right.

As you're using all your upload speed, the acknowledgements for downloading the pages you're trying to view are having a much harder time getting back to the server, so the server won't send out the next bit. (Think of it as calling your friend and asking for something, getting it in the post, then calling and saying "thanks, I got that, now can you send the next bit"...only happening much faster ) If you use the experimental client or ABC (Another Bittorrent Client) then you can limit your upload, so that it's not using your full upload, then it will make everything less "laggy". On my connection with 256k up, I limit my Bittorrent to 20k/sec (out of about 30k/sec that my connection will sustain) and i notice no difference between that and not uploading.


Confused

 

[Cheetah8799]

I agree, sounds like the upload is maxed out, and your acks aren't getting through.

Use Azureus for your bittorrent client and you can throttle the upload speed.

http://azureus.sf.net

 

[Rainsford]

Well don't I feel like the big dumbass. I usually have my school's internet connection, which is symetric (and fast enough that I don't have to worry about swamping it), so it didn't occur to me that the upstream bandwidth is much less than the downstream bandwidth on my DSL. I mean, I knew it, but I somehow "forgot" when I was trying figure this all out. So I looked at the speeds and said, "Not even close to 1.5 Mbit, I'm not swamping the connection." But now I limited it and it seems to work fine.

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