Are Afrihost throttling torrents ?

A

arni1954

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I found that torrents on Afrihost are going at a speed of no more then 25 Kb while the same torrent is going at a speed of 50kb when I am using Telkom .:confused:
 
I dont think so ...

Why dont you use Usenet - news servers?
 
On Afrihost with a 384 line...getting on average 35-43 kb/s

Yesterday had a torrent at a much lower rate, but I think it's cause there weren't many peers seeding it...
 
With Afrihost i get full line speed, about 425 kb/s. With Telkom I'm lucky to get half of that. In fact with Telkom alot of my pages don't even open correctly, and I really struggle with uploading on Gmail. Afrohost FTW!
 
Something weird on Afrihost that doesn't happen on Telkom account, it will shoot up to full line speed (430kb/s +) and then all of a sudden drop to 5kb/s or so and remain there until i stop and start the torrent again and it goes back to full line speed (430kb/s+)...does this every few minutes :( i can't leave a torrent to DL on it's own.

any tips please?
 
Last edited:
fxit_man said:
Something weird on Afrihost that doesn't happen on Telkom account, it will shoot up to full line speed (430kb/s +) and then all of a sudden drop to 5kb/s or so and remain there until i stop and start the torrent again and it goes back to full line speed (430kb/s+)...does this every few minutes :( i can't leave a torrent to DL on it's own.

any tips please?
Click to expand...

Ya... I think it's got something to do with the maximum number of simultaneous TCP connections on your machine. I think the default on Windows XP is 10. You need to increase this to a higher amount.

Read here for more - http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1497
 
Thanks but I'm running Windows 7 retail which apparently doesn't have this restriction?

And how would it explain the same torrent running full speed on Telkom Internet account?
 
arni1954 said:
I found that torrents on Afrihost are going at a speed of no more then 25 Kb while the same torrent is going at a speed of 50kb when I am using Telkom .:confused:
Click to expand...

I have a 384K uncapped account with SAOL, and I am downloading a well-seeded torrent at about 35KB/s. If I pause the torrent, then switch over to Afrihost bandwidth, and resume again, I get 41KB/s. So I would think that SAOL is definitely throttling its torrent traffic, while Afrihost is not. Yesterday I downloaded a 700MB torrent using Afrihost bandwidth on a 4mbps line (at work - love finishing off at month end!) and got a download speed of about 400KB/s - quite close to max line speed...

So all indications to me are that Afrihost either do not throttle their torrent traffic, or throttle it very lightly, that you can hardly notice.

I've heard on these forums that they will be launching uncapped sometime soon. Gian has told me via email that we can expect it some time in the first half of this year... Hopefully their quality of service will be better than SAOL. I will be ready to jump if the pricing and service is good.
 
Yeah torrents for me average around 36-42 KB/s.
Downloading from HTTP is around a solid 40KB/s though.
 
fxit_man said:
Something weird on Afrihost that doesn't happen on Telkom account, it will shoot up to full line speed (430kb/s +) and then all of a sudden drop to 5kb/s or so and remain there until i stop and start the torrent again and it goes back to full line speed (430kb/s+)...does this every few minutes :( i can't leave a torrent to DL on it's own.

any tips please?
Click to expand...

What client are you using? Sometimes on uTorrent, I throttle my download speed to 10KB/s and when I unthrottle is flies at 100KB/s for a second or two (I'm on 384). The download speed calculations aren't accurate on uTorrent when it comes to changing the speed and stopping/starting the torrent.
 
fxit_man said:
Thanks but I'm running Windows 7 retail which apparently doesn't have this restriction?

And how would it explain the same torrent running full speed on Telkom Internet account?
Click to expand...

Good point. The interwebz behave in weird ways sometimes... You never know what might fix a problem. But since you are using Windows 7, it is highly unlikely that this is the problem. Are you downloading a well-seeded torrent? There could be a number of reasons for the different speeds. I would suggest you test out several well seeded torrents on each accounts, and then compare results. It's difficult to go on just one comparison.. Could be multiple issues like how many local (RSA) peers/seeds are connected, how the traffic is routed, whether there is a (better) route to your local/international peers/seeds, whether local peers/seeds are on the same network as you (IS/SAIX), shaping and throttling policies at the ISP, etc...
 
Afrihost do not run their own ADSL network, they are just reselling bandwidth from Internet Solutions (IS).
 
Kaufies said:
What client are you using? Sometimes on uTorrent, I throttle my download speed to 10KB/s and when I unthrottle is flies at 100KB/s for a second or two (I'm on 384). The download speed calculations aren't accurate on uTorrent when it comes to changing the speed and stopping/starting the torrent.
Click to expand...
uTorrent. It's definitely accurate as i can see it takes forever when the speed goes down to 5kb/s.. It stays there until i stop/start the torrent again....then it goes back to 5kb/s after a minute or two.

ToxicWazte said:
Good point. The interwebz behave in weird ways sometimes... You never know what might fix a problem. But since you are using Windows 7, it is highly unlikely that this is the problem. Are you downloading a well-seeded torrent? There could be a number of reasons for the different speeds. I would suggest you test out several well seeded torrents on each accounts, and then compare results. It's difficult to go on just one comparison.. Could be multiple issues like how many local (RSA) peers/seeds are connected, how the traffic is routed, whether there is a (better) route to your local/international peers/seeds, whether local peers/seeds are on the same network as you (IS/SAIX), shaping and throttling policies at the ISP, etc...
Click to expand...
Yeah could be anything was just wondering if anyone had similar experiences..

But i'm not basing it on one torrent from one site, basing it on a few very well seeded torrents from various sites.. And i even connected to my TI accounts on a few torrents to see if it wasn't just my afrihost account which it seems to be..

Btw I have encryption forced and running off port 8080 - same settings when tested on Afrihost and SAIX.

Thanks for the advice.
 
fxit_man said:
uTorrent. It's definitely accurate as i can see it takes forever when the speed goes down to 5kb/s.. It stays there until i stop/start the torrent again....then it goes back to 5kb/s after a minute or two.
Click to expand...

What I'm saying is it could be going at 5KB/s the whole time and when you stop then start uTorrent reports a different speed, just for a little while.
 
arni1954 said:
I found that torrents on Afrihost are going at a speed of no more then 25 Kb while the same torrent is going at a speed of 50kb when I am using Telkom .:confused:
Click to expand...

having the same problem for the past few days.
thought my connection was faulty..
sometimes they float around 10kb..
 
It seems to be an IS problem. I noticed on Axxess Uncapped IS Express that torrents are being shaped horribly. Seemed to occur immediately after the SAT3 cable break. I'm wondering if their satellite path is also shaped as badly.
 
EricsON said:
It seems to be an IS problem. I noticed on Axxess Uncapped IS Express that torrents are being shaped horribly. Seemed to occur immediately after the SAT3 cable break. I'm wondering if their satellite path is also shaped as badly.
Click to expand...

must be the satelitte coz on fibre i was downloading the other day at full speed
 
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