Download speed vs upload speed ratio

hi, i am having a slight problem when i am downloading off this page.

when i am at school, the connection there is very good and i get upload speeds up to 2mb/s - i am
however limited to 5gb of traffic each day.

at home i have a crappy adsl and can only upload at 90kb/s

my problem is that my download speed seems to depend on the upload speed, you see, my download
speed is usually only about 1/5 of the upload speed. thats usually not a problem for me when i'm at
school since then i upload around 2mb/s and only download at 200kb/s (which is still a good speed).
however when i'm at home my download speeds are usually really bad (around 20kb/s) and the upload
is hogging all the 90kb/s of my connection.

now why the hell does my download depend on the upload?(it does, the download goes down if i cap
the upload at school, it always stays at 1/10-1/5)
i mean, i have no problem seeding untill i have a ratio of 5 or something but why do i have to maintain
a ration of 5 while downloading the file. it seems i am being punished for having a good connection
(when at school).
e.g. today at school my 5gbs of traffic went 4gb upload and 1gb download, and since i wanted to
download both prison break episodes in 720p, i had to finish at home.
when i got home, my download speeds are 20kb/s which means it will be finished sometime tomorrow
which sucks.

i don't get it, in an optimal world everyone would have ratio one, and average ratio can never go below
one. how can you then force everyone to have uploadspeed to download speed ratio 5, that means
everyone is uploading much more than downloading, then who is downloading what we are uploading?

its just i'm really pissed because i wasn't able to watch prison break today ;d

i frequently dl faster than i ul. it's not the site, it's something on your end
as z said. sounds likes you have your client set to maintain a ratio of 5.

okay, thx for your replies, the reason why i think it has something to do with eztv is that this doesn't
happen on any other trackers i'm using, and this happens to my friends' computers too.(again only on
eztv)

i always thought i was being rewarded when i uploaded because of this rule:

iii) you are running too many torrents. torrents reward you for sharing -
if a peer receives a lot of data from you, it will 'reward' you by sending you
more data. so the more you upload the faster you will download. spreading
your upload too thin can reduce your download speeds. this is especially true
early in the life of a torrent.

but then i realised my speeds just depend completely on the upload speed.

do a little more reading on the torrent protocol, and do a little more research,
you might get a better understanding of what settings you need to play around
with to optimise it for yourself.

here's some guidelines:

* as a rule of thumb, set your maximum upload speed to about 70-80% (i can't
remember the exact number others have suggested) of the max your connection
allows. if you set it too high, your connection ends up choking with too much
overhead for the uploading. you should also set the max number of upload
connections to a reasonable value.

* there's a small program, whose name i can't remember now, perhaps somebody
else can point it out, which allows you on a windows machine to increase the
number of half open connections allowed at any one time. this helped me to
increase my download speeds.

* most implementations of the torrent protocol work such that between you and
another leecher, the upload and download speeds tend to be equal, ie basically,
the more you upload to someone, the more they download to you, etc so that
everyone gets the file. i find that this is true of newer torrents with less
seeds. there are some torrent clients out there that will try to match your
upload speed to the speed of the peers you're connected to, for example
bittyrant, so that it will penalise (or rather make sure someone doesn't get
more from you than you are giving them), which some may disagree but which i've
found to be most fair for new torrents.

some connections are just asymmetrical in nature, ie they physically can't
download faster than they upload, its just the way they've been designed (i
believe adsl is asymmetrical), so unfortunately, you may have to put up with
giving out a little more than you take, but you can take some steps. you should
be able to get better than 20kb/s from your adsl line, try some of the things
i've suggested.

not unless you want to install a carrier grade exchange dslam in every home.

k33p1ng i7 l33t. w0rd.



as far as i'm aware, youre phone line has a number of channels. adsl splits them
appropriately into 3 groups. 1 small group for telephone (full duplex) one large
group for downstream (half-duplex) and one smaller group for upstream (also,
half-duplex.) this is a physical thing that is handled by the microfilters. some
adsl providers allow the customer to sacrifice some of the used downstream
channels and put them towards the upstream. very rare though. again, this is
stuff that i learnt in my data-comms college lectures and i'm having trouble
remembering properly.

i agree with frackinaussie in regards to torrent communication protocols -
though asymmetrical connections are faster down than up ... as already
corrected by others.

yes robakri, you are rewarded for sharing more, however when you have your
uploads set to unlimited (or too high) it will actually slow you down because
your upload bandwidth will be saturated uploading to peers and there will be no
upload bandwidth available for you to send ack confirmations and make requests
for new packets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ack_%28computing%29

i'm on a 1500/256 connection. i set my upload to 15 kb/s and will receive a
well peered file (aka - any eztv torrents) at 150 kb/s (unless the tracker/s is
flooded with 50,000 leeches to 1000 seeds).

aydin, wtf? you should be able to get a much faster download speed than that on
your 5mb connection - like about 400 kb/s. when downloading, you should be
able to set your upload to around 30-35 kb/s without being penalised by the
tracker and then set your client to switch to unlimited upload when the file
finishes downloading.

so to the op ... while chances are you cant do anything about your
upload/download ratio at school, consider these other factors for home:

-- are you using a decent torrent client? eztv recommends utorrent or azureus.

-- try putting a limit on your uploads ... it could actually make things faster.

-- have you tried port forwarding? enabling upnp port mapping? turning on your
dht?

-- are you downloading/seeding more than one torrent at a time? this will fuck
u up on slower connections. it can be fine to do when downloading torrents
that are slower due to small peer numbers (cause it obviously wont download
faster than the few available people can upload to you) ... but when it comes
to popular torrents, you "spread your upload too thin" between multiple
files/peers/trackers - and then the tracker on each torrent thinks you are
leeching and limits your download.

-- in utorrent "options > preferences > bittorrent" have you set-up
your "numbers of connections"? my settings (though my hubby likes to change em
on me) are: global max connections - 1000 / max connected peers - 500 / upload
slots - 5 / and tick the "additional upload slots" check box.

-- is your connection flooded? yeh you mighta stopped your torrents, even
closed your torrent client, but after downloading popular torrents your ip is
still hit by thousands of peers looking to connect to you. it is easy to
forget the 50,000+ peers that have hit your connection when your client has
been running non-stop for weeks on end. sometimes the only cure is to reset
your modem and get a new ip. downloading lost, jericho, and heroes in one day
will most certainly crash my connection by days end.

-- in utorrent "options > preferences > queueing" check your upload ratio
settings.

-- give the little proggy a try (mentioned by frakinaussie) that increases the
number of half open connections on windows systems. unfortunately, i too
cannot name the prog. anyone?

-- have you tried adding extra trackers? you'll probably find the single
tracker provided with brand new prison break torrents will be offline and wont
connect for hours (especially on ur home connection) which can also be a
culprit for slow downloads. try my tracker list below (be sure to change the
xx's).

-- lastly, does your isp limit torrent traffic?

thats about all the tips i can think of. good luck. 🙂

-------------------

here is my tracker list for eztv torrents - though one of them is acting up on
heroes torrents (crashing connection) so i would appreciate some input on which
tracker that might be. use this list of trackers and you will always
connect ... even on the most popular of eztv torrents.

http://eztv.ukrabel.com:60500/announce

http://eztv.sladinki007.net:60500/announce

http://tracker1.istole.it:60500/announce

http://tracker2.istole.it:60500/announce

http://tracker3.istole.it:60500/announce

http://tracker4.istole.it:60500/announce

http://tv.tracker.prq.to/announce

http://tracker.prq.to/announce

http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/announce

http://open.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

http://tracker2.bt-chat.com/announce - this one says "the requested address is
not valid in its context" (does anyone know right address?) however, this is
not the problem tracker for heroes.

the tracker causing me issues with heroes is one of the following. any ideas?

http://www.torrent-downloads.to:2710/announce

http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce

http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

http://www.sumotracker.com/announce

-------------

okay thats it for my babbling ... im off to watch stargate atlantis. goodnite
all. 🙂

wow what a mighty post. obviously im in a chatty mood today.

yeah, thanks for those who corrected the asymmetry issue i mentioned. i now seem
to recall the issue with asymmetric connections is that if you're downloading
from those with an asymmetrical connection, they will never be able to upload to
you as fast as you can upload to them (because someone on an adsl connection as
mentioned will download much faster than they can upload). this has nothing to
do with why the op can't download as fast as he/she uploads, its to do with the
peers possibly connected to him.

my bad.

ven:
maybe if you are crashing with heroes, pb etc in one day, you have set your
limits too high. i have the same package as you 1500/256 (bloody aussie
internet!!!) and i have set mine to max global connections : 600, max per
torrent : 100, upload slots : 6. this does me fine, and i never crash on big
days as you mentioned.
i found this info on a site suggesting the calculations, so i will have to hunt
around for the website.

edit:
found the site!!
http://www.johntp.com/2006/04/19/how-to-increase-download-speeds-of-utorrent/

hope that helps someone 🙂
any better suggestions/sites would be appreciated!!