dbchoong Posted January 6, 2007 Posted January 6, 2007 Now that I have Skinny Red (Singnet 10mbps) and also Fat Green (StarHub 12mbps), I hereby declare the winner to be: SKINNY RED by a KO!! Based on a download, it was about 3 times faster than the Fat Green guy (12mbps). Man, was I surprised! Thank goodness I'm saying bye bye to the Fatty... ;D
louco73 Posted January 6, 2007 Posted January 6, 2007 Interesting, but was the download local or o/s? Given all the damage from Taiwan's earthquake and the re-routing that had to happen I wonder if things are still in a bit of a mess? Also, Skinny Red has better upload too right?
dbchoong Posted January 6, 2007 Author Posted January 6, 2007 It was a torrent with stuff with majority of the peers from USA. I've never had an average download rate of 134kB/s with Fat Green before. With Fat Green, I had a peak up to 700kB/s once before, but average is usually about 50kB/s. Skinny Red's upload is also decent (supposed to be max 1mbps). :)
sonofdbn Posted January 7, 2007 Posted January 7, 2007 I currently have both (Singnet 5Mbps and Starhub 6500 or whatever it is now, which will stop at the end of the billing cycle), and I can't really notice a big difference other than upload on Singnet, which is 512kbps vs 384kbps on Starhub, where it's clear that there is more upload bandwidth. One thing I did see, which might just be an anomaly, is that when the PC is connected directly to the Singtel modem, the speeds seemed to be better than when going through my Netgear router (attached to the modem). For example, uploads hit 70kBps vs 40-50 kBps via the router. (Yes, that 70kBps is higher than 512kbps... ???) I didn't think the router should make such a difference, but I admit I haven't really tested it out.
louco73 Posted January 7, 2007 Posted January 7, 2007 One thing I did see, which might just be an anomaly, is that when the PC is connected directly to the Singtel modem, the speeds seemed to be better than when going through my Netgear router (attached to the modem). For example, uploads hit 70kBps vs 40-50 kBps via the router. (Yes, that 70kBps is higher than 512kbps... ???) I didn't think the router should make such a difference, but I admit I haven't really tested it out. One thing I have noticed with my Netgear Wireless router is that the DNS resolution is very slow for sites with lots of images/video links. Some peoples blogs and sites like MySpace are an example where it just can't resolve all the names. If I connect direct to the modem it's fine.
armoury Posted February 5, 2007 Posted February 5, 2007 I get the impression Fat Green does funny things with torrents, i.e. they try to target, and then throttle, anyone who's using torrents to D/L stuff. Which makes me wonder if Fat Green is the best way to go if you torrent a lot of stuff. Having said that, the IT manager here said she once got a warning letter regarding torrents from her ISP, although I think in her case it was Pacnet. No doubt Singnet would be just as bad, whereas I've never heard of anyone on Fat Green getting one. With the earthquake, torrents have been pretty danged slow recently -- a 350MB file that would've taken about a day or 1.5 days to complete now takes 4 to 5 days. Although over the weekend things seem to have improved slightly. I guess I'll find out this week (starting tonight) when the new "cycle" of stuff goes online.
louco73 Posted February 5, 2007 Posted February 5, 2007 I get the impression Fat Green does funny things with torrents, i.e. they try to target, and then throttle, anyone who's using torrents to D/L stuff. Which makes me wonder if Fat Green is the best way to go if you torrent a lot of stuff. [snip] With the earthquake, torrents have been pretty danged slow recently -- a 350MB file that would've taken about a day or 1.5 days to complete now takes 4 to 5 days. Although over the weekend things seem to have improved slightly. I guess I'll find out this week (starting tonight) when the new "cycle" of stuff goes online. I was just thinking this over the last week. I do think it has to do with the earthquake and I can't really argue against that. I mean would you rather the torrent goes a bit slower or your web pages take longer to load? :) I also agree things seemed to improve on the weekend. I got one 350MB file in hours. I'm still seeding the Xtremeplace DVD and pumping out ~40kb/s constantly over the last few days. I think that points to more fancy network prioritizing of overseas torrents. Going back to before the earthquake it was quite possible to get a new 350MB torrent in an hour or two. Will have to see if those days return.
armoury Posted February 7, 2007 Posted February 7, 2007 Going back to before the earthquake it was quite possible to get a new 350MB torrent in an hour or two. Will have to see if those days return. Really?!?? :o I was lucky to get it within a day, or at the very fastest, overnight (i.e. start when you get home in evening, say 9pm, by next morning 7am it's just about done). And although things improved over the weekend, this morning when I checked it was down to a sub 1.0kB crawl again. Could you PM details as to what you use and what your settings are like? FWIW I use Azureus, which was an improvement over the basic Bittorrent, but one gripe that recently has become an issue is that I seem to be D/L-ing a lot of "wastage", e.g. for a 350MB file I have to download 400+ -- I understand Peer Guardian, a plug-in, can help block IP addresses that are seeding rubbish, but the Mac OSX version requires Tiger and I'm still on Panther.
Quest88 Posted February 7, 2007 Posted February 7, 2007 Hmmm... I am using the basic starhub plan (dunno what speed, but its the slowest one) and can get 350mb files within an hour as well. This is current performance. for large files, e.g. 5+gb, usually finish overnight. I don't usually look at the speed, but i see it fluctuate between 100-200kbps usually. However I think I have a cap on how many downloads can hit this rate.. from what I can see. Not sure why but on my previous PC speed was much slower. i took the settings from a hardwarezone thread.
dbchoong Posted February 7, 2007 Author Posted February 7, 2007 This morning downloaded a 350Mb torrent (episode 16 S2 of Prison Break.. can't wait for TCS.. ;)) on Skinny Red. Started the download. Had my breakfast. Then checked the PC - finished - took less than half hour. The PC I use to do the download is a very old PII notebook with 128Mb running WinXP. :)
darthmax Posted February 7, 2007 Posted February 7, 2007 This morning downloaded a 350Mb torrent (episode 16 S2 of Prison Break.. can't wait for TCS.. ;)) on Skinny Red. Started the download. Had my breakfast. Then checked the PC - finished - took less than half hour. The PC I use to do the download is a very old PII notebook with 128Mb running WinXP. :) Prison Break is a popular TV show, surely you can get it within 30min. I'm on Fatty Green express 6000 package and it can finish download less than 30min. :) 3 latest episode of heros finished ard 90min just now. :)
dbchoong Posted February 7, 2007 Author Posted February 7, 2007 Yeah, popular shows with lots of seeds and peers definitely download faster. I used to be on Maxonline 6500 and for a month, on 12000 - but overall - Singnet seems faster for me. Maybe my area has too many MOL users sharing the same green pipe. I would say at best, MOL is as fast, but most of the time - slower in terms of download and upload speed. :)
armoury Posted February 8, 2007 Posted February 8, 2007 Hmmm... I am using the basic starhub plan (dunno what speed, but its the slowest one) and can get 350mb files within an hour as well. This is current performance. for large files, e.g. 5+gb, usually finish overnight. I don't usually look at the speed, but i see it fluctuate between 100-200kbps usually. However I think I have a cap on how many downloads can hit this rate.. from what I can see. Not sure why but on my previous PC speed was much slower. i took the settings from a hardwarezone thread. :o :o :o Must be something wrong with my settings then, although I've consulted the Azureus wiki and implemented their recommendations. Even before the earthquake, I never got anything like the speed you have -- a 350MB file would be overnight at best, 5GB would take the whole week. Nowadays, fuggedaboudid... And it's not that the stuff I'm downloading isn't popular, they easily have over 1,000 seeds by the time I get going. Or could it be the modem? Mine is a Samsung, about 4 years old (can't remember when I signed up to MOL).
Quest88 Posted February 8, 2007 Posted February 8, 2007 well, my modem is a motorola.. also 4 years old. i'm not sure about the modem thing, but there was a thread on hardwarezone about it also. some guy got starhub to replace his and he said he got better speed. better to check over there than here for this i think. :) 1,000 seeds is good. some of my downloads only got 100 seeds, but can still hit 100kbps if lucky (based on what i put onto my list today).
basspundit Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 I've also looked at azureus wiki, I think Fatman is indeed doing packet throttling for bit torrent packets. Try turning on encryption, i use it NOT to hide what i transfer but to encrypt the packets so that they can't filter it. My xfer rate went up from a measly 5k to 60kps
armoury Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 I've also looked at azureus wiki, I think Fatman is indeed doing packet throttling for bit torrent packets. Try turning on encryption, i use it NOT to hide what i transfer but to encrypt the packets so that they can't filter it. My xfer rate went up from a measly 5k to 60kps Ah. That was one thing I was hesitant to try, because it's supposed to use up more CPU power/time. Then again, if I'm D/L-ing overnight or while at work, it doesn't matter if 100% of CPU resources are dedicated to Azureus... just that when we get home and the missus wants to use the computer, I'd have to stop all torrents. I've been tweaking the settings a bit more, the odd thing is that although I've set a max upload speed in the preferences, it doesn't seem to "take" with the individual torrent, although I suppose maybe I'm not interpreting the display correctly. In any case, the individual torrent never exceeds the overall limit I've set (20.0kBps U/L speed). The results, anyway, which may or may not be due to changes in settings, are that speeds do seem to have improved somewhat, maybe even close to or as good as pre-earthquake results. Still, that still means that the best I see is in the 10.0-15.0kBps range and I don't get these magical 60kBps or even 100kBps speeds that you guys seem to get sometimes. Just to ask a dumb question: are we all talking about the same thing here? 100kBps or 100kbps? I.e. bytes or bits? Big difference -- eight-times' worth -- after all.
basspundit Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 I didn't limit individual torrent upload but limited the max upload cap to 16KB/s. Heh yeah I'm talking about KBytes per sec :) I think another factor could be share ratio, apparently some people throttle uploads to leechers(which I am also one of em), gonna wait and see whether this is indeed a factor. Ah. That was one thing I was hesitant to try, because it's supposed to use up more CPU power/time. Then again, if I'm D/L-ing overnight or while at work, it doesn't matter if 100% of CPU resources are dedicated to Azureus... just that when we get home and the missus wants to use the computer, I'd have to stop all torrents. I've been tweaking the settings a bit more, the odd thing is that although I've set a max upload speed in the preferences, it doesn't seem to "take" with the individual torrent, although I suppose maybe I'm not interpreting the display correctly. In any case, the individual torrent never exceeds the overall limit I've set (20.0kBps U/L speed). The results, anyway, which may or may not be due to changes in settings, are that speeds do seem to have improved somewhat, maybe even close to or as good as pre-earthquake results. Still, that still means that the best I see is in the 10.0-15.0kBps range and I don't get these magical 60kBps or even 100kBps speeds that you guys seem to get sometimes. Just to ask a dumb question: are we all talking about the same thing here? 100kBps or 100kbps? I.e. bytes or bits? Big difference -- eight-times' worth -- after all.
Quest88 Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 yeah, talking about kilobytes. 100+KB/s is pretty common to me, even with 50 seeds. if you get these rates.. well.. assuming you have similar usage as me, you'd finish downloading everything much faster and can off torrents when you want to use the PC. my PC is now off when i'm in office also, whereas previously i always have to leave it on to complete. the things i can remember setting are: 1. opening up the max no. of connections in router (had to use 3rd party firmware for my linksys) 2. opening up max no. of connectoins on winXP via some dos program (vista doesn't seem like it needs this) 3. client settings. i use utorrent. encryption seems important. i also use random port. upload speed to set at 80% of max. like basspundit mentioned, i think if you have a higher share rate, it does seem to move faster overall. i reduced no. of connections here though. i think what the community seems to be pushing is lower connections, while retaining higher rates.. (e.g. i upload only to 2 people with 20kbps, so each person gets 10kbps for just my connection)
armoury Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 Interesting. I can't use uTorrent since I have an iMac and I don't think there's a Mac OSX version of uTorrent. But the recommendation of using encryption is much appreciated, and I'll try that this evening. And back to a problem I raised earlier: how much "wasted stuff" are you downloading? on a 350MB file it would appear that nowadays I usually get at least 60-70MB in wasted stuff, which takes longer, also hurts my share ratio and requires me to upload more to get it back above 1.0. I distinctly remember that pre-earthquake this wasted download would only be a few MB, rarely above 10. Last night I was 'watching' a 350MB file complete its download. It was stalled at 99.9%, missing just one 128kB piece, for quite a long time. Most frustrating... (at least it finished shortly thereafter, and I was able to then watch it ;D )
auratux Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 Like you, I have fiddled around with my uTorrent to improve the speeds. Turning the encryption on did help a lot. One thing I learnt was you can download OpenOffice using torrent to test your settings as they apparently have a dedicated torrrent server. Good for testing as you don't have to worry about unrealiable peers here. http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/index.html Can't remember the speeds I got but the download rate sure made me ;D Unfortunately, I'm still not getting 100+KB/s for other files.
armoury Posted February 10, 2007 Posted February 10, 2007 Well! Encryption does seems to make the difference, I get 10kBps reasonably often now. No blazing 50+ speeds like some of you do, which may be a function of living in an area chock-full of condos, but at least it's not crawling at sub 1.0kBps any longer. Thanks for all the suggestions!
yellowhandman Posted February 10, 2007 Posted February 10, 2007 Well! Encryption does seems to make the difference, I get 10kBps reasonably often now. No blazing 50+ speeds like some of you do, which may be a function of living in an area chock-full of condos, but at least it's not crawling at sub 1.0kBps any longer. Thanks for all the suggestions! trying encryption...did you set a fallback for non-encrypted sources? (later) WOO-HOO! 40-80 kB/s downloads!
armoury Posted February 10, 2007 Posted February 10, 2007 trying encryption...did you set a fallback for non-encrypted sources? Yes I did. If you're using Azureus as well (can't remember what you use), read:- http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping (later) WOO-HOO! 40-80 kB/s downloads! I wish :'( The best I get is just under 20kB/s, with 5-15 being more common.
yellowhandman Posted February 10, 2007 Posted February 10, 2007 Yes I did. If you're using Azureus as well (can't remember what you use), read:- http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping I wish :'( The best I get is just under 20kB/s, with 5-15 being more common. actually, now i'm getting consistently at least 40kB/s, and even up to 180kB/s for a single torrent. quite breathtaking...right now, i've got three torrents going at 60, 30 and 45.
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