[lug] Bittorrent getting lots of bits, but the file fills up slowly

[Michael Hirsch]

On 4/29/05, D. Stimits <stimits at comcast.net> wrote:
> Michael Hirsch wrote:
> > I'm having a very strange problem.  I'm using bittorrent
> > (btdownloadxxx.py) to get the latest mandriva distribution.  I have
> > comcast so I'm getting over 300 KB/s.  Great huh?  Nooooo.
> 
> Just curious about a few things. In /proc/sys/net/ipv4/, does file
> tcp_ecn show a "0" or a "1"? If it shows 1, you might be seeing the
> result of explicit congestion notification running into a broken router.

It's '0'.  
 
> Also, when you run "ifconfig" for the interface being used, what do you
> see for collisions, errors, dropped, and overruns? Those should all be zero.

I should have thought of that.  Unfortunately, I've since rebooted the
system, but it doesn't have any error right now.
 
> If the any of the above are a problem, it might not be bittorrent at fault.

It seems to me that it must be BT's fault.  BT showed that I was
getting tremendous download bitrates, and that I'd downloaded many
bytes, but the actual file sizes were small.  I can imagine a bad
router, or bad network setting keeping BT from working well, but then
BT shoudl tell me that.  BT said everything was fine when it wasn't. 
Even if I had a problem with my networking, BT is at fault for telling
my I was getting 300KB/s.

Michael