D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] How to test for throttling and what should I look for?

 

If the speed test is using ookla or other decent service it is likely correct, and 
you can attain those numbers with an appropriate service or set of services.

The performance you get from any particular service or program will depend on a lot 
of things. The remote server's connection, how far away it is, what protocols are 
used, traffic shaping by ISPs. A colleague has a Gigabit Internet connection, and 
uploading stuff to server protected by a DDOS shield he was immediately throttled 
back to 10Mbps by the shield, it took objection to him using 80% of available 
bandwidth for one connection. Quite a few web servers are still connected at 10Mbps 
(or more commonly these days virtual servers are throttled back to this to allow a 
lot of cheap web hosting accounts to be sold from small server farms without the one 
annoying git trying to do his own video hosting spoiling it for other users).

A lot of peer to peer stuff still runs off boxes with ADSL and lousy upload links. 
So you could connect to a dozen peers and only get 10 or 15 Mbps aggregated 
potential bandwidth.

I would check ISP policy, a lot throttle BitTorrent. My guess is it is deliberate.

Ask yourself what BitTorrent performance you need 5Mbps should be plenty to watch a 
video soon after starting a fetch. If ISP doesn't limit, and you need more, check 
the settings in the BitTorrent software, can it use more connections would be my 
first question.

But yes quite likely that anything beyond 20 or 30 Mbps is not going to provide huge 
benefits for individual home users. The main advantage of massive bandwidth I see is 
that things sensitive to congestion and jitter work fine without having to mess with 
QoS and tuning, and you can play with huge files, and do a lot of things 
concurrently. Sure I'd like more bandwidth, but aside from some occasional jitter in 
Skype I don't REALLY need (although I'd save a bundle on we hosting costs), and I 
see fewer performance issues with large downloads than some with FTTB because I have 
done some tuning out of necessity. 

If it is throttled there may be other peer to peer services which are harder to 
throttle. There are tools to spot traffic shaping like "glasnost" but I've never 
needed one.
-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq