Full Fibre - Torrent Downloads - Speed

[#1]

Plusnet customer, recently upgraded to the 500Mbit/s FTTP product. Connection stable and reliable, gives consistent speeds of ~520Mbit/s down and ~72Mbit/s up.

When downloading torrents, the connection is quite "stop-start" - see the attached graph. Occasionally it reaches the theoretical max download speed of around 60MB/s, but it tends to drop to zero a lot as well. Up and down, up and down.

Didn't have this problem with my previous FTTC connection.

Does anyone know what might be causing this to happen please?

Thank you.

It goes without saying that I'm not using torrents to steal copyrighted material.

[#2]

You will most likely find that this is more to do with the site you are downloading from - they will have a limit set which would allow you to get a consistent (say) 60Mb/s download, but object to providing a consistent 500.

[#3]

@bigalxyz 

AIUI, downloading torrents is not done by 'connecting to a site' (so that has no bearing on achievable download speed), but by connecting to (usually many) individual peers who may be at varying stages of completion of the target file(s) they're sharing.

Have you set a torrent upload speed limit which is well within your stated package upload bandwidth, as saturating your upload bandwidth will reduce your download speed?

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@bigalxyz wrote:

When downloading torrents, the connection is quite "stop-start" - see the attached graph. Occasionally it reaches the theoretical max download speed of around 60MB/s, but it tends to drop to zero a lot as well. Up and down, up and down.

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Perhaps not the cause of your problem in this instance but IME that's the sort of stop/start effect demonstrated when you aren't connected to any seeds, or perhaps seeds who are severely limiting their upload speed, but you are connected to some fellow leechers who occasionally complete a piece which you don't have and then allow it to be uploaded to you at a fast speed.  As soon as you've 'caught up' with all the pieces which they have, then your overall speed will drop until they have more pieces that you need.

It may well be that your improved download speed is 'exaggerating' this effect due to the download 'catch up' bursts being completed much quicker than your old connection could manage.  Just a thought. 

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[#4]

@RobPN - Thanks

@bigalxyz My apologies - checking up, I was wrong

[#5]

Thanks for replying. Thinking about it some more though, there's something important that I forgot to mention (mea culpa) - I'm not downloading to my main PC, I'm downloading to a NAS (Raspberry Pi + 2TB SSD). This introduces another element into the equation - whether the wired connection to my NAS (from my router) is working at full speed. This came to mind because I've just copied a couple of big files from my PC to my NAS (all wired connections) and the transfer speed was about 20MB/s which seems (?) to be quite slow...?

Also I downloaded a couple of torrents directly to the NVME drive on my main PC and the start/stop problem didn't seem to happen (not a very big or thorough test, admittedly, but it's something).

Might need to do some checking of my home network cabling. With my previous FTTC connection (~70Mbit/s), it wasn't a bottleneck, but maybe it is now. I've got one of those RJ45 testers (with 8 green lights that either light up or don't) so I might dig that out soon and check everything over.

The Ookla Speed Test app on my Apple TV (which uses the same wired network connection as my NAS - shared via a little network switch) only gets about 90Mbit/s download speed instead of 500+, which makes me think there's a problem.

[#6]

You can check the network card interface speed on you raspberry pi using this command in a terminal window

sudo ethtool eth0 | grep Speed

the result should be either

Speed: 100Mb/s or Speed: 1000Mb/s

For windows in a power shell you can use this command

Get-NetAdapter | select interfacedescription, name, status, linkspeed

the result would look something like

interfacedescription                           name       Status LinkSpeed
--------------------                           ----       ------ ---------
ASIX USB to Gigabit Ethernet Family Adapter #3 Ethernet 5 Up     100 Mbps
Realtek USB GbE Family Controller              Ethernet 4 Up     100 Mbps
ASIX USB to Gigabit Ethernet Family Adapter    Ethernet 2 Up     100 Mbps
Intel(R) 82578DM Gigabit Network Connection    Ethernet   Up     1 Gbps
VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter          Ethernet 3 Up     1 Gbps

The problem I getting your Mb or MB correct

Ookla do offer a cli version of speedtest for various platforms where you can change the reporting from Mbps to MB/s. This speedtest would be handy for a raspberry pi lite.

Worth noting you need a raspberry pi 3 or above for 1000Mbps ethernet.

HTH

[#7]

Thank you.

When I checked it out, the particular model of Apple TV that I have only supports 100Mbit Ethernet, so that’s a separate issue from anything affecting my NAS.

I’m ok with a bit of Linux command line fun with the Pi (it’s a 3B+ I think) so I’ll check out your suggestion soon.

All the cables between router and NAS are Cat 6 or greater, and my network switch is good for gigabit speeds, so that all should be ok.

[#8]

sudo ethtool eth0 | grep Speed (ssh from my PC)

gave me 1000Mbit/s

So all is well on the face of it 👍

[#9]

I found this statement 

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ was launched on Pi Day 2018 with a faster 1.4 GHz processor, a three-times faster Gigabit Ethernet (throughput limited to ca. 300 Mbit/s by the internal USB 2.0 connection), 

300 Mbps = 37.5 MB/s

HTH

[#10 · Accepted solution]

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Suddenly it starts to make sense.

Pi upgrade incoming...?

Thank you (sorry - I could have googled this myself - I didn't give it a thought)

[#11]

It was a random thought on a Sunny afternoon in Sussex

With the fast broadband connection you would have only just noticed .