Configure ktorrent for fastest downloads

Fri Jun 28 09:04:18 MST 2019

Cox and CenturyLink are both _very_dependent where you live and performance
expected.

I'm old like Stephen in using cox since the 90's, and that was in the old
Maryvale hood, where it worked rather well, but only because I was likely
the only person using internet there in the 90's.  It was absolute crap for
a friend that lived a few miles away in aerial drops, just because the coax
was generally maintained worse there.  Working at Cox in 2002-2003, we had
parts of town, particularly older area of town like old Tempe, or areas
they bought from other local Cable companies that were just terribly
designed RF plants.  Where I've lived the past 20 years is newer parts of
peoria (build '95), so it works fairly well here for both.  We'll never see
fiber though.

You were probably in a "trouble" area, but got fixed at some point.  Buying
business services in a crap area sometimes makes them fix it.  Sometimes
not..

Cox has since replaced most old crap like that, just because they had to
for docsis evolution.  The do still maintain reasonable levels on nodes, so
you don't have to worry too much about oversubscription.  Their biggest
issues have been staying ahead of capacity in general, both across the
valley, and their peering with L3 in LA that all phoenix egresses (unless
using business).

CenturyLink DSL works ok for me since switching.  I've only seen one outage
so far, last friday, and overall the speed is good.  I do notice they are
_really_ oversubscribed in their peering to L3 too.  This tends to cause
things to load slowly at first, but most folks would find this
imperceptible I think.  I know because 20 years as an network engineer tell
me things, and I know how the isp's are run.

It's all what is most important to you I suppose - cash or performance.
Cox is like Apple, CL is like some off-brand Chinese Android, but mostly do
the same things.

-mb

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 8:08 PM Eric Oyen <eric.oyen at icloud.com> wrote:

> Well,
> I am paying about $86 monthly for my current cox business service. That
> includes modem rental, interior wire coverage, 4 hour priority call
> service, etc.. Believe me, I was paying more than 40% more for similar
> residential service and getting only about 1/2 of what I was paying for on
> average (according to sam knows).
>
> Now, as to how the cable is routed into the house here, it all comes in on
> the west wall from an underground conduit fed in from the pedastle at the
> street. We have had the cable replaced once in the last 5 years.
>
> The problem with the telco in this area, most of the phone lines are over
> 55 years old, have lots of half taps, capacitive crossovers, full taps,
> breaks, and various other issues. The last time I used telco lines here was
> in 1998 and QWEST had such abysmal service that I was down far more time
> than up. In fact, because of one consistent outage issue, I ended up filing
> a complaint with the Arizona Corporation Commission as well as a consumer
> complaint via the state attorney general’s office. The telco response was
> to accuse me of running an illegal file sharing server, during a period of
> time when I was in a documented service outage. That was in 1998 and I went
> to cox and never looked back.
>
> -Eric
> From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Customer retention Dept.
>
> On Jun 27, 2019, at 11:52 AM, Michael Butash <michael at butash.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> Curious what you're paying for that these days from Cox Business.
>
> I used to work for them some ~20yr ago, so had it for many years, but
> found it not worth the cost over time.  I moved to residential, which was
> fine, other than the every 4 years or so I'd have to call them to come
> replace feeder cable to my house from cable suckage (heat/metal
> expansion/contraction, not literal), and have to wait a day to get a tech
> here.  Upstream isn't so important unless you're trying to be the next
> piratebay top 10 seeder, so I'm all for cost savings, thus moving to
> centurylink the past year.
>
> Which by the way, I rather hate lec/telco's by nature, so this was
> difficult.  My doing so was purely a financial decision.  Shame Cox
> implemented data caps, I never minded paying a bit more for better service,
> but when randomly 10-20 dollars higher than normal, I got angry.
>
> Side note - business modem usage of RF spectrum isn't any different from
> residential users, you only get a different modem config file that allows
> things like tcp/25 and 80 ports, more synchronous bandwidth as mentioned,
> and that's really it.  Coming from someone working with cable modems circa
> '99 pre-docsis, their hype isn't all that besides 24/7 physical support,
> more synchronous bandwidth, and better peering (ie. local peering vs.
> California egress, some ~20ms).  Cox does however in general do a good job
> of managing bandwidth at the node level, residential or business, to keep
> things copacetic in either regard.
>
> -mb
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 2:10 AM Eric Oyen <eric.oyen at icloud.com> wrote:
>
>> A slight addition, with regards to cox.
>>
>> I use the business class service here, which means that my bandwidth is
>> not the ever present in residential “up to” speed, but is the advertised
>> speed of 65 Mbits/sec. Also, I use a VPN for torrenting over simply because
>> cox, like most other broadband providers) doesn’t like one using a method
>> of file transfer that can be so incredibly abused by those sharing
>> copyrighted content.
>>
>> Now, since I am only 1 of about 20 users on my node doing business
>> service, instead of residential, I am not suck for bandwidth like all the
>> residential users around me. I also don’t have to worry about overage
>> charges (if you exceed 1 TB a month on residential, it can cost up to $10
>> per gigabyte over your limit. If you happen to be streaming 4k content via
>> that connection, you will definitely go over by the 23rd day of that 30 day
>> cycle, especially if you are like my room mate and leave the video stream
>> on 24/7.
>>
>>
>> Now, as for best settings for your torrent client, even the best settings
>> still might not give you peak performance. A lot depends on the health of
>> the swarm (number of seeds >2) and how many leechers there may be.
>> Typically, if you have only a few seeds and a lot of leeches, you won’t be
>> getting any performance out of your torrent client.
>>
>> Now, some of the best settings I have come up with over the years
>> includes:
>> Number of active torrents </= 5. The max global connections is 1000 or
>> less and the per torrent connections no higher than 200. Also, I tend to
>> limit both upload and download BW to about 70% of my overall available
>> bandwidth here. I have other reasons for that, including not causing a
>> problem with the video streaming
>>  That the room mate enjoys. There might be some advanced settings in your
>> torrent client that may also improve performance, but overall, a lot still
>> depends on how many seeds and the level of bandwidth they can feed.
>>
>> -Eric
>> From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Dept of Quality of
>> Services.
>>
>>
>> On Jun 23, 2019, at 8:27 PM, Jim <azanorak at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 6/23/19 2:24 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
>>
>> I find you're only as fast as your 1) home isp connection and 2) torrent
>> peer(s).
>>
>> I know this.  I've got 10 Mbits down and 1 up.
>>
>> Sometimes your speed as only good as your isp, particularly depending if
>> your isp is hating on your torrenting.  Comcast has been known to rate
>> limit torrents actively, thus net neutrality debates were born.  I find
>> using CenturyLink, it is always oversubscribed in their local peering, so
>> things tend to be a bit slow at first, but otherwise window up fast to max
>> bandwidth if enough peers.  Cox charges bandwidth overages now, but their
>> service (internet peering) is generally better quality.  I don't like
>> random surprise overages after watching some 4k movies, so I'm now with CL
>> with no caps.
>>
>>
>> How fast is your Century Link service?  Are you stuck with dsl or do they
>> offer something faster?  I've heard that many ISPs are imposing data caps
>> now so they can screw people out of more money.
>>
>> You should never, ever get torrents from your direct home IP.  Just don't
>> - you are inviting problems.  Get a reliable, trustworthy vpn service.
>> This influences again how fast you are downloading, make sure your vpn
>> gives you good speed too.
>>
>> I got one of those threatening emails from AT&T saying I've been naughty
>> and listing the torrent in question.  I use a VPN now and get no more nasty
>> emails from the isp.
>>
>>
>> Almost any residential service, dsl or cable are asynchronous transfer
>> rates, meaning faster to download than upload.  Interesting thing with
>> cable particularly, uploading at capacity tends to influence your
>> downstream rates in bad ways.  If you are maxing out your upstream to seed,
>> your downloads are likely affected in some way.  It's a long answer why,
>> read up on docsis if interested.  Limit your upstream rates in your torrent
>> client/server to a respectable number is the short of this.
>>
>> Torrents tend to create a _lot_ of packet per seconds and connections  -
>> make sure your router/firewall can handle this.  I've seen torrenting kill
>> enterprise firewalls in session/pps counts.  Connection counts affect
>> memory, and might/will kill a cheapo router.  I see this occasionally with
>> customer "incidents" when doing network/security consulting, and finding
>> someone doing something stupid like installing a torrent client on their
>> work computer as they end up being a top-talker I find with simple source
>> flow counts for *abnormal* traffic.  I've also had roommates kill my
>> firewall doing this, before I find, block, and threaten them with no
>> internet access ever again.
>>
>>
>> I used to have a roommate about 10 years ago who bogged down my internet
>> connection with his stupid online shoot em up games.  I couldn't download
>> anything.  I'd connect to the router and see that he was downloading little
>> but maxing out the upload speed. It must have been something to do with
>> that docsis issue you mentioned.  I fixed the problem by setting a limit on
>> his upload speed so he only got half of what was available.  He complained
>> when implementing this change kicked him offline for a minute or so, but
>> not after that
>>
>> I don't find a lot of other optimization of clients are necessary.  I use
>> a transmission-remote server and otherwise feed everything through that as
>> a server appliance from numerous clients on the lan (desktop, laptop,
>> phone, sometimes remote), and all torrent collection show up as from an eu
>> country via my vpn service.  Above guidelines are quite good for my
>> purposes.
>>
>> -mb
>>
>>
>> I use protonvpn.  It's cheap and it works, and i don't get anymore nasty
>> emials from my ISP.  Thanks for your reply and also thanks to everyone else
>> who replied.
>>
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