downloading and surfing at the same time

[daviestar]

hey folks

quick question on something basic that's been bothering me for... years probably!

surfing is rediculously slow while downloading. yes, I know about capping transfer speeds, but in reality, for me anyway, it makes too little a difference.. my browsing speed is impaired even when downloads are all paused so I have to quit tranmission to end the undesired network activity.

is there anything I can do about this? why is it when, for example, your transmission download speed totals 20% of your average max broadband speed, you don't get anything like the extra 80% for surfing or any speed for other on your network?

any help much appreciated,

dave

[The Guv]

Have you tried reducing your upload speed? If you're upload is too big it blocks your ability to ask for more information because it's filling up your bandwidth with torrents. Try setting it to 10k upload and see what it does?

[daviestar]

thanks for the replies guys.. I have tried capping uploads before without any luck, and this isn't a recent problem.. it's just something small that's been bugging me for years!

Is it true that transmission would need to update.. stuff.. perhaps make connections with peers sharing the same torrent even while a download is paused? possibly to make restarting a download faster?

Is it true that there is alot of 'behind the scenes' network activity involved in torrent downloading outwith the actual downloading of the file? to do with making and breaking connections with peers etc?

cheers!

d

[fredash]

Same problem for me, as previously reported.

iMac Core Duo, Mac OS X 10.5.6, Transmission 1.5b5.

[essiw]

instead of looking to your download speed, look at your upload speed, if your upload speed is to high it will block your download speed

[The Guv]

I do know that running torrents does take up a fair chunk of processing power. I actually bought a cheap intel coresolo mac mini just to run them at it usually running at 25-50% with the single 1.5Ghz processor running with 2Gb RAM.

Maybe it's just a case that you're running a lot of torrents and the mac struggles to deal with it all. There shouldn't be any continuous drain on your system once the torrents have stopped or you're running a low upload speed.

How are you sharing your net connection as well? Do you have a router taking care of different computers, are you sharing it through your mac or do you have an airport base station divvying it up? I've found that having a dedicated wired/wireless router deals with the torrents better than a wired router going to airport.

I keep coming back to download/upload speed thought thinking about the problem. What speed is your connection? On ADSL2+ I run 30kb max upload, maybe the same down during high use times. If you do a search on the net you'll find some nifty calculators that work out the best torrent setup to have. They can tell you the max download, upload and the number of connections that suit your speed.