The Slow Down Induced Insanity

I pretty naive about P2P down loading I'll start down loading a 700mb movie and it will start down loading say at a speed of 80.00 k I 'll surf the net come back and it's dropped to 10.00k I click on find more sources witch does nothing so I start down loading the same file of the same movie and it's cruising at 80.00k again, so I disconnect and rename the original slowed down file that has accumulated more than the new file and rename it the file # of the newer DAT file and delete the newer DAT file and the old slowed down file speeds up again. Is there a method to my madness or am I insane and it's a figment of my hallucination ?

I assume you mean the second you download a file, the kbps will be very high - if you pay attention, it will drop quickly to the speed it will end up at. This is just "one of those things."

Just like if you save a .txt file that is (example) 2kb, when you click save you'll probably see it flash something crazy like 545kbs, or like 1g, etc.

Do a little bit of arithmetic!

Your peak download speed is (approx) one eighth of your connextion speed so @ 56k you will max at 7kbps when settled and for 500k dsl the likely figure is 64.

You will see higher numbers when you first connect to a peer but it will not be sustained.

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Originally posted by poopypantsjones@20 June 2004 - 22:29
I assume you mean the second you download a file, the kbps will be very high - if you pay attention, it will drop quickly to the speed it will end up at. This is just "one of those things."

Just like if you save a .txt file that is (example) 2kb, when you click save you'll probably see it flash something crazy like 545kbs, or like 1g, etc.

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Not immediately I can watch it down load fast for half an hour it's not like the first seconds I connect it almost seams like if I minimize k-lite it slows down and when i comeback it doesn't speed back up even though the surfings ceased and isn't sapping the computing power. So I click on the same file and start the second copy and it's flying.

Change your Port! Your ISP might be restricting your bandwidth. I can't find the post where someone told me to do this, but it works. Choose a port like port 8080, where the ISP wouldn't dare to restrict.

Insanity revisited:

Either you or the people you're downloading from ARE firewalled. BOTH cannot be, because 2 firewalled connections CANNOT connect to one another except through a proxy... which needs 2x as much bandwidth as the transfer runs at to send the file.

What happens is at the time you start the download you manage to connect to probably the most firewalled sources you can easily get. MOST people's connections are a little flakey -- this is due to SPYWARE, ADWARE, overloaded computers, trying to upload at unlimited speed, or (rarely) trying to download at 120% max speed. This means it's common for connections to break and have to be reestablished even every 5-15 minutes.

MOST (~60-90%) of the fast connections are firewalled. This is because broadband users are often running (misconfigured!) software firewalls and/or routers... or the Win XP firewall is enabled. Or they're corporate users which are firewalled at the corporate gateway. Either way, many of the BEST uploaders are firewalled.

Firewalled connections REQUIRE a supernode to maintain their connection to the fasttrack network. The supernode sends them all the information that nonfirewalled connections would get directly. If the firewalled connection jumps supernode (which can happen automatically, ESPECIALLY if it's doing a lot of auto search more's), then that connection route through the supernode is PERMANENTLY BROKEN and the upload to or download from that firewalled source quits -- although the upload/download may reach the end of a file chunk (up to about 8 MB in size) first before disconnecting... thus people have noticed getting/sending exactly 8 or 16 MB of a file and losing connection.

Couple this too with YOUR connection jumping supernode and/or changing ip addresses (if on a dynamic ip such as an ADSL modem or 56k dial-up), and it's a game of trying to shoot moving targets while moving yourself... and the automatic download source retries won't work NEARLY as good as doing a fresh search for more sources.

This problem is true for almost any general-purpose distributed file-sharing network. This is because everyone on Kazaa/FastTrack ISN'T connected to a central server which KNOWS everyone's location at all times. Napster was shut down because it was a centralized network with a central server. BitTorrent technically is too, but it's actually a bunch of mini-networks -- each 1 sharing only 1 file (or file group).

Switeck.

Thanks for a great read, you seem to really know your stuff.

It makes me want to disabled my firewall, I recently installed Zonealarm free version.

I have used the net for about 2 years without one with no problems ! So I suppose I was just lucky.

What do you think about Orcutts reply about port 8080 ?

Digby

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Originally posted by digmen1@24 June 2004 - 08:12
It makes me want to disabled my firewall, I recently installed Zonealarm free version.

What do you think about Orcutts reply about port 8080 ?

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There is a *BIG* difference between having a firewall and being firewalled in Kazaa Lite.

If Zone Alarm is configured correctly, it will NOT block Kazaa Lite's activities OR incomming requests on Kazaa Lite's listening ip port (there is only 1 port open if you disable the listen also on port 80.)

Likewise, having a ROUTER won't make you firewalled IF you use port-forwarding AND KaNAT -- although KaNAT fails from time to time and has very high CPU useage.

So you can have almost ALL the protections of firewalls and routers with none of the penalties. The only 'hole' in your firewall's armor is the 1 ip port that Kazaa Lite uses, but Kazaa Lite is not known to have any vulnerabilities -- although a buffer overrun vulnerability is probably theoretically possible. Even then, it's more likely to cause Kazaa Lite to simply crash rather than run virus code in a 'useful' manner (to the virus-writer!)

Practically NO other program listens/monitors traffic on ip ports above 5000 -- so those programs can't be induced to lock up or work in OTHER undesireable ways either. Viruses and trojans CANNOT 'break into' a computer UNLESS there's something on the computer that LETS them in! If there's no programs listening on the ip ports the viruses/trojans come in on... the viruses and trojans are IGNORED and not loaded.

Using ip port 8080 is ok, if nothing else works. But there are trojans, worms, and viruses which ALSO use that port for the same reason you want to -- it's seldom blocked by ISPs and firewalls. BUT... unblocking that 1 port doesn't neccessarily make your computer vulnerable *IF* you also have UP-TO-DATE antivirus software *AND* have run most/all the windows patches!