Slow download speeds with P2P programs

April 27, 2004 2:15 PM

I'm experiencing very slow download speeds when using either WinMX or Kazaa Lite. [more inside]

I'm on a 64kbps ISDN connection, meaning I can get a maximum D/L speed of about 7kb/s.

And I used to get such D/L speeds up until a couple of months ago. Eversince, whenever I use these programs I get D/L speeds of 0.8kb/s (no kidding). It almost always stays at that rate, except a few rare cases where it may go up to ~1.4kb/s or --ever more rarely-- to ~2.1kb/s.

The weird thing is: I still get a full ~7kb/s D/L speed when downloading files from websites.

So I've only got the problem with WinMX and Kazaa Lite.

What's wrong here?

- I haven't changed those programs' settings (manually setting a cap, or something) so this is out of the equation.

- The possibility that I'm interacting with a user who just happens to be slow on upload speeds is out of the equation too, since I'm getting these speeds with dozens of queries.

- I try not to mess with spyware programs, etc. and I manage to protect myself from viruses pretty well (hopefully), so a secret app running in the background and taking my bandwidth is rather doubtful. Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't seem to give anything suspicious; here's a screenshot though, in case I'm wrong. (For those that may be alarmed by the name, FreeSnap.exe is nothing to worry about, just a useful app to manage my windows.)

- I'm using an account provided to me by my university. I thought that maybe the blocked out these services; nope, friends from my university get the usual ~7kb/s speeds at their homes. Maybe they capped my account only? Nope, I logged in to the Internet using a friend's account, and I would still get those 0.8kb/s speeds.

I'd appreciate all the help I can get on this, folks.

posted by kchristidis to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Are you behind a router / firewall / internet connection wizard. If you're accessing this software from behind NATS, and your friends people are accessing it directly, then this could explain a difference in speed.

Also, I know that it's possible for some P2P software to put a cap on leeches. Is it possible that you're not allowing / not sharing anything back? This could be detected by the other users s/w and they could be capping you.

Do you run the two pieces of software together? is it possible that they're getting in each others ways. Is there anything you installed recently? If you've changed your MTU (with a software download accelorator), then this can have an effect.

There is a chance that your ISP placed a bandwidth cap on your ISDN line. This doesn't have to be linked to your username, and may be linked to the CLI on the dialling line.
posted by seanyboy at 2:42 PM on April 27, 2004

Some good points I should have addressed in my first post:

- No routers/firewalls/etc.

- I believe those specific programs have no automated mechanism to exclude freeloaders. Kazaa Lite gives you a rank of 1000 (the highest) so either you share everything, or you're a freeloader, the system can't tell (it actually treats like you're sharing everything, thus giving you maximum transfer speeds). Finally in WinMX there's no setting I'm aware of that says "deny download requests to users who share 0 files".

- No software download accelerators installed.
posted by kchristidis at 3:16 PM on April 27, 2004

The problem is WinMX and Kazaa Lite are crap. There are few distributors and a lot of leeches, so speeds are slow.
posted by Orange Goblin at 3:42 PM on April 27, 2004

What Orange Goblin said. I've used a bunch of P2P apps and those were the two slowest. I never once got a good connection from them.
posted by yerfatma at 5:12 PM on April 27, 2004

I never once got a good connection from them.

Well as I said, I used to get good connections, up until two months ago, when suddenly one day the transfer speeds bottomed out.

If I fail to find some other reasonable explanation, I think I'll eventually settle with Orange Goblin's version, but it still makes me wonder why it happened so suddenly...
posted by kchristidis at 5:32 PM on April 27, 2004

The likeliest explanation is that your ISP is limiting the ports that are commonly used by these programs. Try changing the ports and your speed should go back up. The following is from a post in the Torrentbits site forum.

"This is because many ISPs (including mine, which I learned earlier today) throttles the speed on these ports.

411 through 413 - Direct Connect
1214 - Kazaa
4662 - eMule/eDonkey
6346 through 6347 - Gnutella
6699 - WinMX
6881 through 6889 - BitTorrent

Please make sure not to choose port(s) in these ranges!."
posted by monkeyman at 9:17 PM on April 27, 2004

Thanks for that tip, monkeyman!

Question is what port number should I choose for Kazaa Lite and WinMX respectively, then?

A random number (I highly doubt this)?
posted by kchristidis at 7:36 PM on April 28, 2004

49152-65535 is the rang recommended on the forum I was reading, but I think any random port will do. Did it work ?
posted by monkeyman at 9:06 PM on April 28, 2004

I did change the port numbers to 49160 and 49161 for Kazaa Lite and WinMX respectively; the former still denies to give me ~7kB/s for popular files (it denies to stay to anything above ~3kB/s), yet the latter tends to give me ~5kB/s more frequently (~2kB/s are still here) than in the last couple of months (no ~7kB/s, but it's close; but then again it's not as constant as it used to be).

To sum it up, it looks like ~7kB/s is forever gone, though the situation seems to be slightly improved. The number of downloads I've tried is too small to deem whether this improvement is random, or due to monkeyman's tips on changing the port numbers, but I guess time will tell (if the improvement is consistent, it means it's due to the latter).

So, what do we get this (assuming we've ran out of tips)? I'm thinking that what Orange Goblin said in combination with my fear (that the situation aggravated during the last couple of months) may be the closer we can get to the truth.

Unless anyone can come up with an additional tip/solution/etc., I'd like to thank everyone who tried to help; and especially you monkeyman, thank you for your efforts to help me.
posted by kchristidis at 6:01 PM on April 30, 2004