bittorrent speed way too low, what possible causes?

[stan]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 22:51:50 -0400
Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:

> At 9:36 AM -0700 6/1/07, stan wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I used torrent to get the F7 live CD and DVD images.  And then let it
> >run overnight to seed.  I've tested my system with the online speed
> >sites and my upload is ~540 KB/sec.  My service from Cox says 512 -
> >2MB/sec.
> >
> >Yet bittorrent-curses maxed out at around 70 KB/sec.  I used the
> >max_upload_rate = 0 to let it go at the maximum rate.
> 
> That's about my max, but I know it's limited by my DSL connection, so
> no help there.
> 
> 
> >I tried with the ports open and closed, no difference.
> 
> That seems odd.  With the ports closed, how could it upload at all?

I think there were some default chains in there from a past trial when
I was getting F6.  They wouldn't remove with chain match.  I had to use
the numeric position to get rid of them.  
> 
> 
> >Is there something else that would limit the upload speed from
> >bittorrent?
> 
> Dunno.  Lack of customers who want your bits?  Limits by Cox on
> BitTorrent? Competition with other Cox customers?  Math error?  Did
> you try restarting the client?  (Sometimes that gets me a better
> group of peers.)
> 
Yes, these were pretty much what I thought of.  I know there is
sometimes confusion between Mbit and Mbytes on the speeds online, but
no, that wasn't it.  I see as many as 59 people so I don't think it is
lack of customers.  Restarted several times.  I'm leaning towards Cox
filtering, but making no hard accusations yet.
> 
> >I don't mind running torrents overnight as seeds as nothing
> >else is happening anyway.  But at these speeds it hardly seems
> >worthwhile.
> 
> 70 KB/s * 3600 s = 246 MB/h.  That seems worthwhile.

Yeah, I suppose it is.  But imagine that at 1.2 GB/hr, which is a
conservative margin of 512 KBytes/hr.

This isn't really a major deal for me as I don't use peer to peer
often.  But I've been paying for years thinking I had this upload
speed, and Cox tells me I've got this upload speed, and I don't.  And
now I'm curious, why don't I have this upload speed?