Throttling or congestion!?

My line: 80/20 unlimited package with a 77/20 IP profile.

Its Thursday evening approx 10pm, no one else using my connection. I try downloading highly seeded torrent and see a burst up to 8MB/s and then suddenly down to a steady 350-800Kb/s

Being a skeptic I try another highly seeded torrent (linux distros) which I know getsme an easy 7-8MB/s., they also sit between 400-800Kb/s

Speedtest.net shows 65-69Mb during this time and TBB test files, get an easy 8.0MB/s+ (Titanium traffic is fine by the looks of it)

I did factor in some impact for the lower priority levels at peak times before signing up, but this is ridiculous torrents are slower than my previous O2 line.

If this is indeed congestion in my area id expect "titanium" traffic to be also affected some, no?

I really don't want 18 months of this ;<

A wise man once said, if its too good to be true, it probably is.

Upstream flooded? (Feeding any other seeds?)

I wonder if a reboot of your router to connect you to a different "pipe" will fix the issue.

If so you'll get full speed, just sadly having to reboot your router until you get a "good" pipe.

Negative, upload was less than <30Kb/s

I also have Bandwidth Monitor to make sure no other rogue apps were using the upstream.

Will keep an eye on it and return for a moan when I know more..

the router right not the modem?

Will give it a go, next time I see it.

Yes, the router, not the modem. Best to "disconnect" in the 582n GUI before rebooting.

It can be useful to know which gateway you are on when things are poor. See this checker.

That sounds very odd, can you PM me your username and I'll get someone to take a look over your account to see if there's anything strange.

Have you been able to download at the speeds you expect on other days? Was last night just a one off? Make sure you get your username over so we can have a look.

Not restarted the router yet, gateway is:

You are currently connected to gateway ptn-ag03.
This is located in Telehouse North.

Tested this morning using torrents, full whack @ 7.5-8MB/s

I have PM'd username to Chris,

BQM from last night, computer was left on all night.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/d8a041b00e4...

In reply to a post by narz:

BQM from last night, computer was left on all night.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/d8a041b00e4...

Interesting graph. The portion to about 22:45 last night is what I'd have expected - it seems perfectly normal behaviour for a PN graph, without any particular high load on the line.

From 22:45 to 00:30 and from 01:00 looks like you were doing something on your line, and fits with the times of your posts last night.

Did you have your torrent running at those times? What time did you stop after 01:00?

Likewise, the little blip starting at 11:00 this morning. Was that when you tested again and got full whack?

If so, then it is interesting to see that the overall latency effect is almost identical this morning (at full whack) compared to last night (around 1/10th of the speed).

My BQM for comparison - FTTC (Extra package) without P2P going on.

We're having a good dig. The gateway/end point you were connected to was showing no significant latency in our bronze queue and was dropping no packets. It looks fine!

You're on Unlimited, so you shouldn't be seeing any rate limiting.

The nature of the problem you are describing sounds like rate limiting to me, but you shouldn't be being limited. Any chance you can keep your torrents going and let us know how the speeds are? I'd be particularly interested in if you see it again, and if it is a gradual decline in speeds (congestion somewhere?) vs a hard drop in speeds (a rate limit being applied that shouldn't be). Try not to disconnect if you want to try this so you stay on the same network kit.

You definitely shouldn't be seeing these slowdowns.

if its idle that graph looks a complete mess.

Thanks for the feedback,

I stayed on the same gateway and did not restart, monitored over the weekend and although speeds were good at times (completely random), not so good at others.

The speeds today are again up and down again P2P/Torrent traffic. i.e the pattern generally is:

Burst up to 6-8MB/s (for about 10-20sec) then down to a steady speed <2MB/s (combined)

It will stay like this for a couple of minutes, before providing another burst and going down again.

The strong reasons I believe this to be connection related are the multiple torrents all jump up and down at SAME time.

At the burst for 30 seconds I see:

torrent 1 @ 1MB/s
torrent 2 @ 4.5MB/s
torrent 3 @ 1MB/s

then they all come down like:

torrent 1 @ 600KB/s
torrent 2 @ 1MB/s
torrent 3 @ <400KB/s

upstream is generally <400Kb/s

To investigate, I restarted the router today to try and eliminate that and the gateway in one go. Jumped onto gateway pcl-ag02, but speeds seem worse now. Less bursts to 8.0Mb/s but more constant.

Bandwidth monitor shows a steady use of 2.5-3.5Mb/s (all P2P combined) when in reality I should be maxed out @ 8MB/s +

Sorry there aren't no real tangible stats to go on or investigate, but such would tell me there is no fault and its purely p2p congestion at play here, as speed tests show an easy peasy 70Mb+ each time, every time.

Thoughts are welcome.

p.s
Is there a 14day cancellation thingy ma jing?

Edited by narz (Mon 10-Jun-13 13:12:13)

@WWWombat

The P2P was running all night and those spikes on the BQM do correlate with the activity.
The latency is also generally ok.

@Chrysalis
Its not idle, my idle graph is clean as a whistle. See below idle starts at 2am.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/c819f2fcb12...


To clarify, congestion here means:

1) There is so much titanium traffic that P2P can't get its foot in. (hence spiking, and sent to the back of the line)
2) Weather this is related too many subscribers or bad prioritization, who knows?

On the plus side - my gaming latency has been good in the 10 days I have been with plusnet. Also I can P2P and game at the same time, which I couldn't with O2.

In reply to a post by narz:

On the plus side - my gaming latency has been good in the 10 days I have been with plusnet. Also I can P2P and game at the same time, which I couldn't with O2.

This is the traffic management doing what it is supposed to do!

Thanks for the additional info. We'll have another look

Hi,

Have you had a look at your usage in the View My Usage tool on our website? Does that look like they amount you would expect to see for what you did yesterday and today? I can run you off a split of upload/download if it looks a lot more than what you would expect to see. I'm on ADSL2+ but I know if my upload maxes out my download speed will drop like a stone.

In reply to a post by DaveTomlinson:

but I know if my upload maxes out my download speed will drop like a stone.

You can avoid that by prioritising upstream ACK's if your traffic shaping system is up to it.

@DaveTomlinson
Yes it looks correct my for my usage, I checked the router stats also before restarting, which matched what I had done over the 10days.

I kept an eye on the upload speed during the downloads and it was generally <40% of max upload.

@batboy
Do you know how much upstream bandwidth *theoretically* is required to send acks when downloading at 8000KB/s

ACK packets are quite small and they also have the ACK flag set, which helps to prioritise them. For example http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/faq-ackprio.html

assuming delayed acks (acking every other packet) then about 1.8mbit/sec.

I've put a screenshot of your usage on a ticket on your account. You should be able to see it here

https://www.plus.net/my.html?action=questions&?helph...

Worth trying to restrict the upload to say 1Mbps and see whether it makes any difference.

Edited by deleted (Mon 10-Jun-13 17:32:55)

Yep, helps if you don't try and make the rules too complicated like I did