Bittorrent On VM

[Ignitionnet]

I'm curious if anyone else is seeing some unexplained behaviour while using Bittorrent on Virgin Media.

I have done the usual tricks and am permitted 50 half-open connections simultaneously so that is NOT the issue in question.

I have checked my router and its' NAT table isn't even close to full.

I have checked the connection to ensure I'm not seeing any issues with bandwidth utilisation. The connection is going no higher than 60% upstream utilisation and isn't even close on downstream.

Pings show the odd spike but nothing to write home about:

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.251.195] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 212.58.251.195: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=118
Reply from 212.58.251.195: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=118
Reply from 212.58.251.195: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=118
Reply from 212.58.251.195: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=118

So why oh why is my browsing utterly mashed to the point of being unusable?

Something to do with these at a guess:

Ah Yes... The columns are:

Frame Number - Time Since Capture Start - Source - Destination - Protocol - Source Port > Destination Port - TCP Flags - Summary

1282 13.113980 192.168.100.2 87.106.129.133 TCP udpradio > http [SYN] Seq=0 Win=16384 Len=0 MSS=1460
1300 13.243386 87.106.129.133 192.168.100.2 TCP http > udpradio [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5840 Len=0 MSS=1380
1301 13.243417 192.168.100.2 87.106.129.133 TCP udpradio > http [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=16560 Len=0
1302 13.243611 192.168.100.2 87.106.129.133 HTTP GET /board/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=12 HTTP/1.1
1661 16.236539 192.168.100.2 87.106.129.133 HTTP [TCP Retransmission] GET /board/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=12 HTTP/1.1
2420 22.171080 192.168.100.2 87.106.129.133 HTTP [TCP Retransmission] GET /board/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=12 HTTP/1.1
2431 22.336216 87.106.129.133 192.168.100.2 TCP [TCP Previous segment lost] http > udpradio [ACK] Seq=2761 Ack=843 Win=6736 Len=0 SLE=1 SRE=843
6337 50.572019 192.168.100.2 87.106.129.133 TCP udpradio > http [FIN, ACK] Seq=843 Ack=1 Win=16560 Len=0
6356 50.747083 87.106.129.133 192.168.100.2 TCP http > udpradio [ACK] Seq=2761 Ack=844 Win=6736 Len=0

For the curious this also proves that I don't have a problem with half open connections - the connection was open I just couldn't do anything with it for whatever reason

It also eliminates the possiblity that it's my router - the SYN, SYN-ACK was already done and the connection had been set up in my router's NAT table already.

The first bit was fine, the next bit was loss central then my machine gave up and just sent the FIN to CF.

Is this normal behaviour while using a not particularly challenging amount of Torrent bandwidth? More to the point why?

[Impz2002]

im having the same issues and are yet to find a solution. whenever i get a torrent going with utorrent my browsing just stops working and as soon as i stop the torrent it magically starts working again !

Impz

[Ignitionnet]

It bothers me a bit the first bit was absolute fine, 130ms to get the connection open then send the HTTP GET which is fine, then one request gets incredibly delayed and two others get lost.

[Jonathan90]

do you leave it going for 5 minutes then try or do you try straight away within the first few minutes your connection is going to be dodgy cause of all the connections its making also routers just complicate the problem if modems can jsut about handle torrent connections etc (people say there modem reset etc) then router just make it worse have u tried without router leave the torrent going for 5 to 10 minutes then try browsing.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Jonathan90

do you leave it going for 5 minutes then try or do you try straight away within the first few minutes your connection is going to be dodgy cause of all the connections its making also routers just complicate the problem if modems can jsut about handle torrent connections etc (people say there modem reset etc) then router just make it worse have u tried without router leave the torrent going for 5 to 10 minutes then try browsing.

Have a read of my OP again when you've a moment - the NAT table entry in the router is present as the SYN - SYN-ACK - ACK goes fine, and obviously I'm not at TCP/IP stack half-open connections limit as the TCP connection is opened fine. It's the HTTP GET that disappears into the ether twice and is severely delayed once.

Originally Posted by Impz2002

im having the same issues and are yet to find a solution. whenever i get a torrent going with utorrent my browsing just stops working and as soon as i stop the torrent it magically starts working again !

Impz

I had the same issue when I upgraded to utorrent 1.8. I seem to have cured the problem by going into preferences and unchecking all boxes in bitorrent section apart from 'ask tracker for scrape info. I also unchecked all boxes in connection section apart from firewall option. I know nothing about it but it seems to work for me. Running utorrent & emule kills my browing whatever upload/download limits I set.

[fugu]

Im on a good 10 meg connection *touches wood*, if i leave downloads and uploads unlimited (or at max up, ~70Kb/s) then my browsing goes to crap, This is even if im downloading somithing at 50Kb/s. If i cap them both to ~800Kb/s down and ~45Kb/s up then browsing returns to normal.
Dont know if this will help you, but works fine for me

[Ignitionnet]

Maybe this is something to add as a comment to the blog at http://onewayinternet.blogspot.com/

I think I'm spoiled from having better upstream connections perhaps, either way it's pants.

[popper]

its wasnt just utorrent, it was any torrent clients running in the background last night,i tryed several different ones, im not good at traceing with wireshark etc but if you run your capture though it again i bet somewere along the VM path something funky was going on with the udpradio as the torrent paths were intercepted.

next time try tunneling through to a totally non VM end point with the tor/Vidalia Bundle for instance and i bet you get through to 87.106.129.133 (i assume CF but cant be bothered to check the ip )

theres definately something funky going on in sections of VM at times such as last night, dont know if its routing, DPI settings in some kit or what, but you are in a far better position to sus that and report back to keep us informed

---------- Post added at 10:33 ---------- Previous post was at 10:26 ----------

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

Maybe this is something to add as a comment to the blog at http://onewayinternet.blogspot.com/

I think I'm spoiled from having better upstream connections perhaps, either way it's pants.

i cant or wont add anything there until Ignition gets around to changing the settings to allow for annon posting on the blog.

blogging is a good way to get the word out today,as its tracked far more widely than average webpages today,but i refuse to keep registering just to comment there, and its clear Ignition is reading our threads as the comment "As someone kindly reminded me" makes plain ,that should read "someone called Popper reminds us" btw Ignition

[Ignitionnet]

Hi Popper,

UDPRadio was just the label that Wireshark has for the port my machine was using to send the requests to CF, port 1833.

I'll look into it some more tonight.

If you check he's also taken your advice at some point, blog allows anon comments now. I just had a nose and could leave one, not entirely sure what to say though for once in my life

[LaineY]

had this issue 2-3 years ago

turned out to be my Scientific Atlanta EPC2100 REVISION (1) that was causing the issue

couldnt cope with the traffic..
infact even if i opened utorrent or bit commet and left it for 5 mins with NOTHING downloading
it would still lock up my browsing..

i was using a router too... turned out it was the modem..
got it changed for a motorolla and all of a sudden things were hunkeh dorreh

[Sirius]

One of the reasons i dont use Bittorrent any more.

[Andrewcrawford23]

If you want to use torrent you should try torrentflux since it handles it different ie just like a web page it doesn't affects your browsing much unless your daft enough to set upload to 100%, it also doesnt have that high a load on it, only down side is you need to install it on *nix server so you one of them first

[popper]

Originally Posted by Andrewcrawford23

If you want to use torrent you should try torrentflux since it handles it different ie just like a web page it doesn't affects your browsing much unless your daft enough to set upload to 100%, it also doesnt have that high a load on it, only down side is you need to install it on *nix server so you one of them first

no it isnt andrew, TorrentFlux is just a PHP based front end to the generic torrent client Bit Tornado package (Requires Python 2.0+,wxPython for the GUI client)
http://www.bittornado.com/download.html

and you dont need to use it on linux (although that will be your better choice OC , a simple slax LiveCD/USB and now even PXE lan booting in the latest test CD ISO or even a VirtualBox install on one of your near idol LAN PCs will do just fine)

any PHP based self contained install +webserver will do http://www.uniformserver.com/ for instance.

[Ignitionnet]

Torrentflux is just a web front end for Bit Tornado. Installing a web GUI on a remote *nix / PHP compliant box to manage a torrent client sitting on my PC is a tad pointless and doesn't really achieve the aim. Still have masses of connections stemming from where the torrent app is actually running. It's not the GUI that's my problem.

Agreed Sirius however it's a World of Warcraft patch which is distributed by BT.