Ports and Torrents

This issue has been a big pain in the backside for me... since moving from UK Online i have suffered from BT's traffic shaping like everyone else.

I use uTorrent and currently use port 50459 with this port forwarded on the hub. I have left a torrent downloading overnight and only hit a max of 256kb/s which was for only a very short spike. The torrent has plenty of seeders so i should deffinatly have a higher speed. My upload rate is set at a max of 35k. I have encryption enabled (not forced) and incoming legacy connections ticked.

Which port do you guys have the best speed from? I was thinking of something like 443 or 80 but would like your opinion first?

Thanks guys.

Ports don't seem to make much odds... other than the default torrent ports and close numbers - which drop to 12Kb/s during traffic managed times for me - if I use another port I get 60KB/s during traffic managed times - this sucks because one of the games I play uses a port very close to the default port so if theres a big game update during peak times I'm screwed.

On torrents I see 250KB/s from ~8am til 6pm when it drops to 60KB/s until either midnight or 2am where it goes back to 250KB/s until about 4am where it jumps to the line max til around 8am.

Please tell me what port you use to achieve 60kb/s??

I doubt that ports used make much difference, more likely that's differences in seed\peer numbers, bandwidth of those connected, etc.

http://www.arbornetworks.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1466&Itemid=693

Have a read of the product briefs there, it'll give you an idea of the techniques and equipment used.

Ulitimately, it's copyright material for free, can't you wait 5 minutes?

Tenacious, I would turn down your upstream - it probably won't make any difference to your downstream, but the upload counts to your total throughput, and gets you closer to being put on the naughty step. I'd also look at forcing encryption, and refusing legacy connections. Have you checked that the port forwarding is actually working?

Also, if you have "resolve dns" on, turn it off. All you're doing is sending hundreds of DNS requests per hour so you can have a pretty flag beside each IP. (It also gives the Home Hub a hard time and can lead to DNS resolution failing)

Well i have changed my port to 80 and tested it (confirmed it's forwarded). Forced encryption and disabled legacy connections... I peaked at about 700kb/s today at around 2pm ish.

Today BT got a little better

To be clearer on what I was saying...

If you use any port be it 12000, 50435, 440 or whatever I get 60KB/s during peak times - if I use 6881 or any port in the roughly 6700-6999 range I only get 12KB/s max often less... BT seem to have a seperate policy for these ports... which is unfortunate as I play several games that use ports like 6994 (city of heroes) for game content/patch updates so if theres a big patch during peak times I'm screwed.

It seems worse atm - its only 5:45pm and I'm only getting 8.5KB/s on the COH update while HTTP is still doing 500+KB/s - I tried this morning before work around 9am and it was slow then too - and its not the content server thats the cause of the slowdown.

Remember that the ports used are in effect across multiple networks - it may be that the peer's ISPs are using port-based control, but if you read the link I posted earlier you'll realise that this is not how the BT system operates.

Switching torrent traffic to port 80 is not going to make any difference on the BT leg of the network - the actual packets sent are inspected and classified.

Edited by deleted (Fri 08-Aug-08 19:47:54)

To be even more clear...

City of heros does NOT use peer 2 peer for updates it merely uses a port that is close to the default port for bit torrent clients. I have tested this with different types of traffic to different hosts at different times of day.

The fact of the matter is that seperate to the traffic management policy that causes my connection overall to be capped to ~0.5Mbit during peak times - a certain specific range of ports are being throttled on my connection atleast to ~0.1Mbit/s for all and every kind of traffic on them.

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Aug-08 01:24:01)

why did you drop ukonline? 2nd post I read in the space of 5 minutes of someone joining BT then complaining about throttling, its quite a well known fact on here that BT throttle so a strange choice of isp.

I dropped UK Online as i moved back in to my mums who has a staff BT broadband deal. Otherwise i was perfectly happy with UK Online