My internet otherwise is pretty much webbrowersing and whenever I turn on µTorrent it slows down my useage of Firefox. This was true before when torrents were working and I accepted it. This is still happening even now when torrents go nowhere.
bleh I'm still hoping this is some sort of temporary thing but it's been going on for much longer than normal.
By "go nowhere" do you mean slow download?
If the download is slow, it shouldn't slow down Firefox loading pages. Conversely, if the bittorrent download is fast, it would make sense that web pages would load slower in Firefox.
How about your upload speed though? What is it?
Have you limited it? Perhaps on a per torrent basis? If so, try taking that limit off. What happens then?
Balancing the upload/download limits for maximum efficiency can be tricky.
bleh I'm still hoping this is some sort of temporary thing but it's been going on for much longer than normal.
Could be a lot of things.
How many others online at the same time as you have a 100% copy of the file? How many others are trying to download it?
If the ratio is way out of line, like 2 vs. 50 , it is likely that your download will be slower than usual.
Could be, on top of the above, that whoever has a full copy is on a slower internet connection. If that is true, there is nothing you can do.... just put up with it and wait.
You mentioned a litmus test. Here is mine. Two parts - try it and let us know the results - I'm sure somebody here will then have some more comments on your situation.
1.) Go to
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ Do the speed test a couple times. Try different servers.
I found that the one closest to me is noticeably faster.
Report back the results here.
Be sure to report it in
both the formats that they give it
to you.
Example - copy-n-pasted:
Last Result:
Download Speed: 737 kbps (92.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 127 kbps (15.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
2.) Do a test download from a known good source:
(Even if you don't want whatever it is you download)
You don't need to complete the download either, just
enough to be sure of your max speed.
Go here:
http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/
Scroll down the column with the header name of
"complete".
Look for a higher number.
For example, right now I see:
ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386.iso 698MiB 164 19
That's a 698 meg file with 164 people online with complete
copies! 19 presently downloading.
That's the kind of ratio that won't bog it down!
I just grabbed the torrent and tried it.
Using utorrent 1.6 here, not the newest version
Within seconds, the download rate leapt to the highest I've
ever seen. You know that sometimes when you start a
download that it takes a while to come up to speed?
Not with this torrent!
It was a steady 80kB/second, sometimes bumping up
higher.
On my DSL connection, that is very good.
What kind of internet connection do you have?
Try that same file, or another with lots of people online
with complete copies.
Let us know what download speed you get.
You don't have to download the whole file - just let it run
long enough so that
you get a good idea of how fast it is downloading, and let
us know what that is.
I think it will be interesting to compare your results from speakeasy.net/speedtest with
the available known fast download.
I have little experience with other stuff via bittorrents. Played with a couple from places like you mentioned, and found it not unusual for speed to be in the 10 to 15kB range. Maybe that is what you are experiencing. That in combination with other things, and I lost interest in it.
It is however, an excellent way to obtain huge files, like linux distros. Resume works great.
