Solved Is my ISP throttling upload speeds?
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Does anyone know of a way to check to see if my ISP is throttling or even preventing upload sharing? My download speeds are still relatively great (sometimes reaching ~15mb/sec), but it seems that lately every torrent I download hardly uploads more than a few hundred kilobytes.
I know that some torrents I'm seeding are older and have little to no leachers, but even newer ones I'm seeding with many leachers are uploading literally zero kilobytes. I've never seen this until recently, maybe a couple of months, and I'm worried about my ratio. Also I do appreciate seeding whenever possible as a good member.
I'm considering testing out a VPN to see if it helps, but before I go down that road I figured I'd see if anyone had any suggestions for how I might test out my theory. Thanks in advance!
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I am experiencing the same issue for a long while now 99% of the time. I don't think a VPN would help in the matter to be honest. I tried it once and all it did was drop my download speeds significantly. If you have any solution to this in the future, please share
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This could be a port forwarding issue. In order to get proper upload traffic, you need to have the port forwarding in place. Specifically, you need to make sure that the port that your torrent client uses is forwarded through your home router or VPN to your computer, both in TCP and UDP. This is a necessary step in order to get proper upload traffic.
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@patbear said in Is my ISP throttling upload speeds?:
I figured I'd see if anyone had any suggestions for how I might test out my theory
Just download something with high demand from a public tracker, could be a movie or a TV show episode. If it's downloading/uploading just fine with a decent speed, keep it seeding for a day and see how much active time seeding it gets. If it's seeding consistently with a decent average speed then it's not your ISP blocking/throttling your connections but rather a different issue.
Firewall settings might be preventing you from connecting to some of other members' IPs for security reasons. It could be your firewall, could be the other member's, could even be the ISP's firewalls.
You can do some port checks to see if everything is ideally configured on your side just to make sure. That might not end all your problems as the symptoms you described could be tied to other matters as well.
For instance, having a high demand (lots of leechers) doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be uploading to any of them. Torrents with too many leechers usually have a huge number of seeders.
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@ianfontinell One thing I like to keep an eye on is how much of the torrent others in the swarm have. BiglyBT lets me add a column for "Swarm Average Completion." If the SAC percentage is significantly higher than my own completion percentage then I think it's logical to expect less upload traffic. If I have 80% and the SAC is only 50% then I'd expect to be uploading more.
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@patbear - I encounter something similar now and then on my own torrents I upload, finding that once others are onto the seeding, my own uploading...on my own torrents...will drop down to zero seeding. All I can say is that others likely have better connections and are superseding your own seeding capabilities. I simply stopping worrying about it long ago for that very reason.
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As a general rule, if you use a VPN that supports port forwarding and your speeds go up dramatically, but your port forwarding settings are in place for your home network and yet it doesn't work well, this is usually a sign that your ISP is throttling P2P traffic on their network.
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Thanks everyone -- these are all great suggestions and replies! I'm going to do some more due diligence and research as time permits and report back in case anyone is interested.
Again thanks for the ideas. You're all great!
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Topic has been marked as solved
MrMazda
