bittorrent slow

[Guy Fraser]

On Tue, 2006-21-03 at 15:47 -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Florin Andrei wrote:
> > 
> > I cannot be 100% certain, but Comcast appears to work fine if you change
> > the BitTorrent ports to some non-standard range.
> > 
> > It appeared to be slow yesterday with standard ports, but that might be
> > due to weak population of the early BT swarm.
> > 
> 
> My download started off quite slow (~20 Kb/s), but it was running at up
> to 300 Kb/s around midnight (CST).  IIRC, the last couple of test
> releases showed the same pattern.  It *could* just be the swarm ramping
> up, but Comcast might also be taking the governor off late at night.
> 
It may also be that there is more bandwidth available, because 
there are less users on at that time. We have a number of 
International Business customers, but most of our traffic 
is from 08:00 EST (06:00 MST) to 19:00 PST (20:00 MST) between 
20:00 MST and 06:00 MST our traffic drops to between 25% and 50%
of the average traffic during the day. I would bet that Comcast
has similar usage patterns. Many ISP's pay for traffic using 
the 95th percentile of traffic over a month, so it is better 
for your ISP if you schedule your seeding/leeching during off 
peak hours. During peak hours your ISP may take measures to curb 
your BW to maintain a lower overall 95th percentile, other ISP's
may prefer you go elsewhere because they are paying more to 
service your connection than you are paying for it.