How do I get more out of my network?

Task manager and the network manager app both say that I am at less than 1 percent network usage.

I am downloading Ubuntu (for those who don't know, just think "a huge file"), and the torrent file provided on their website has several thousand seeders, but it is going at .1-1KB/s. How do I fix this? I want to have, say, 50% network usage with just these programs, so that my downloads will go faster.

The same is true with regular downloads.

Also, for a while I had bridged my hamachi and my LAN connections, and the bridge acted as a gigabit switch.
My internet speed more than doubled.

Now, that doesn't work anymore.

How do I fix that (that would increase the speed greatly). I normally download a regular file at 3-500KB/s, and

Speedtest.net says I have a download speed (with that thing that gave me gigabit) of 6Mb/s and an upload speed of 0.43Mb/s. Now, it is back down to 2Mb/s (before I had the gigabit, it was 5Mb/s) and 0.24Mb/s, respectively (before the gigabit thing, it was spiking at 0.43, sustaining 0.40)

Who is your ISP? Some providers (especially cable modem providers) used a shared hub between tens or hundreds of customers. So there may be nothing you can do. One thing you can check though is bypassing your hamachi system and plugging directly into your modem. From there try your downloads and see if they're quicker. If not, you may have a bad line to your place, which means that your ISP may need send a repairmen to your place.

dark_15 said:

Who is your ISP?

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AT&T

dark_15 said:

[...] One thing you can check though is bypassing your hamachi system and plugging directly into your modem.

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I already plug in to the modem directly. I'm saying that one time I was experimenting with a network bridge, and I bridged my Hamachi and LAN connections to see what would happen
What ended up happening was me getting gigabit connection, but then it fell down below the starting speed. I undid the network bridge, and it stayed the same (I discovered before removing it that I was back down to 100Mbit)

So your answer is great.... for someone who misunderstood it the same way. Lesson: go back later, and make sure I still know what I meant by what I am about to post before hitting submit.

The speed you are initially noticing is a misinterpretation by windows. It has to do with TCP Window sizes, it starts very large and aggressive showing you downloading very fast, then the connection scales itself back to fit your connection and make sure you aren't dropping any packets. As for the gigabit switch, the slowest link in your whole chain is what is going to determine how fast anything out to the internet will be (The AT&T Connection) Is this u-verse? Regular ol DSL? If you experience steady network slowdown I would reboot the modem if it becomes constant I would call the ISP and have them run a test against your modem to see what your DSL levels are at. It may be as simple as cleaning all of the contacts between the pole and your house as they tend to corrode after awhile. Hope this helps!

This is regular DSL. However, as I am unhappy with the speeds when they are maxed out, I am getting U-Verse. Also, I ran the ping test (no; I didn't ping a website. I used the one linked off of Speedtest.net) while it was fast, and no packets were lost. Can't I get it back if that's the case?

Lost packets you mean? TCP automatically recovers in a lossy connection, the point being is that if it detects it COULD lose packets its going to intentionally narrow the window (thus your effective download speed) to make sure it doesn't have to retransmit the same data over and over. Since you are getting u-verse they should fix any cabling issues during the install, but again if you notice issues I would notify AT&T and have the technician go through from the DSLAM (Usually at the end of your street) all the way to the side of your house where the wiring comes in and verify everything is clean and the signal looks good.

That's my point; I didn't lose any packets, but it narrowed the window anyway.

ISPs often sharply limit the connection after a certain amount of information has been transmitted, which may be a factor. Heavy downloads/torrenting will result in your burst speed far outweighing your regular pipe.

Also, the way DSL works is that one connection is shared between dozens of people. During times of heavy traffic your connection will noticeably slow, and vice versa. Having a traditional cable connection will help maintain constant speeds (though you lose the benefit of occasional unusually fast speeds).

On the last thing you said, what would be the effect with U-Verse? Is it subject to the same changes as traditional DSL?

U-verse uses fiber to neighborhood nodes, then distributed by ethernet. Since the fiber would probably never be fully used, you should be able to always get your maximum rated speed with it. The rated speed should be higher too, so it's definitely an improvement over DSL.

Oulse said:

ISPs often sharply limit the connection after a certain amount of information has been transmitted, which may be a factor. Heavy downloads/torrenting will result in your burst speed far outweighing your regular pipe.

Also, the way DSL works is that one connection is shared between dozens of people. During times of heavy traffic your connection will noticeably slow, and vice versa. Having a traditional cable connection will help maintain constant speeds (though you lose the benefit of occasional unusually fast speeds).

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I get consistent downloads here with DSL. More consistent than 2007 and 2008 Comcast.

Comcast is the one where at least in the past, the speeds were really fluctuating.

fgf80 said:

That's my point; I didn't lose any packets, but it narrowed the window anyway.

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Duh, how do you know no packets where lost? TCP has a resend mechanism where it detects it did not manage to send a package (was lost on the way), resends it and then throttles the connection until they are not lost anymore.

If packages where lost the only way you would see it would be by noticing that the throughput is going down (unless you had your network cards driver in some kind of debug mode).

Looking at the percentage utilization of your network card is pretty useless unless your network card and internet connection work at the same speed, that is if you have a gigabit network card and gigabit internet card then the utilization would be meaningful. If on the other hand you have a gigabit NIC and 10 mbit internet connection then the theoretical maximum you can use is 1%, as your internet connections speed is 1% of your network cards speed.

I'm sorry, but the original post is slightly confusing, anyway I'll try to comment on it:

Task manager and the network manager app both say that I am at less than 1 percent network usage.

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They show the percentage of use of your gigabit (1000mbit) network card. You later said that at best you where getting 6mbit results from speedtest which is less then 1% utilization.

I am downloading Ubuntu (for those who don't know, just think "a huge file"), and the torrent file provided on their website has several thousand seeders, but it is going at .1-1KB/s. How do I fix this? I want to have, say, 50% network usage with just these programs, so that my downloads will go faster.

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What torrent program are you using? Does it have diagnostics to show it can connect to the network ok? If your router has NAT you might have to do port forwards to get the most out of downloading torrents. Also looking at your speedtest results you have a fairly slow upload speed, if you use that fully your downloads could suffer a lot.

Of course your ISP could also be throttling torrents.

The same is true with regular downloads.

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If you are only getting 1KB/s downloads regularly then something is really wrong, also your network utilization would not be showing 1%, rather 0.001%. Of course this can easily happen from some really slow guest, but if that was the general case then loading something like a news sites front page would take about 10 minutes.

Also, for a while I had bridged my hamachi and my LAN connections, and the bridge acted as a gigabit switch.
My internet speed more than doubled.

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Sorry, not very familiar with Hamachi except that it's some kind of VPN. Also not understanding how you bridged it "with your LAN connections".

Now, that doesn't work anymore.

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So it was working and suddenly stopped, or it worked, you stopped using it and it would not start again?

How do I fix that (that would increase the speed greatly). I normally download a regular file at 3-500KB/s, and

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Earlier you said regular downloads are 1KB/s?

Speedtest.net says I have a download speed (with that thing that gave me gigabit) of 6Mb/s and an upload speed of 0.43Mb/s. Now, it is back down to 2Mb/s (before I had the gigabit, it was 5Mb/s) and 0.24Mb/s, respectively (before the gigabit thing, it was spiking at 0.43, sustaining 0.40)

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Remember speedtest results can vary quite a bit from day to day, still it can be a good indicator (at least if you combine it with testing downloads from some fast hosts).

With a 2Mb/s connection you should be able to download at about 200KB/s

With a 4MB/s connection you should be able to download at about 400KB/s

and so on.

Your internet connection seems to be lower then 10MB/s even at it's best. Hence it makes no difference to your internet performance if your computer (or hamachi, or that bridge you made) is running at gigabit speed, since you have a slower bottle neck right after it.

Really I don't know if I should have even bothered with this. I find it absurd that you manage to write such a confusing post, and start slamming at the first senior who attempts to help you with your problem. At no point did you mention that you are not using hamachi all the time. I understand it can be stressing to have problems with your internet connection, but venting it at the guy trying to help (especially as everything he said was spot on given your explanation) is really not called for.

First of all, I *did not* slam dark_15. I gave an answer to his question, and corrected him where (due to my failure to elaborate on the bridge I used) he was wrong. Slamming a person is NOT the same as correcting a misconception. Second of all, I said that my regular download speeds had done the same meaning that they had slowed down greatly. They are still at about 60KB/s for an average file. Third of all, I was (due to someone else's lack of elaboration where if I knew more about networking it would not have been necessary), under the impression that any packets lost would be lost in between my computer and theirs, not within my own. Pingtest.net, from what I understand, is designed to pick up such losses. Also, I obviously implied that I used hamachi all the time, as you said that I never pointed out using it all the time. Also, I was using hamachi the entire time, and it just stopped interpreting the network as gigabit, and went back down to megabit. Finally, I constructed the network bridge by going to "network and sharing center," clicking on "change adapter settings," and, selecting both my hamachi VPN and my LAN, right clicked on one and selected "bridge connections." However, since you so easily interpreted my previous corrections as "venting" and "slamming," you will likely interpret this as such. I will give the benefit of the doubt that you had, in fact, had a bad day and were interpreting all interactions as such. I am sorry if I did, in fact, slam dark_15, but I and others have reread my reply and not found it as such. If you can show how it can be more easily seen as that than as a correction of misinformation, then I would sincerely appreciate it if you would do so.

Also, I pay for 3Mb/s. My internet browsing and normal usage are fine. I am not complaining of slow internet. I am complaining of slow torrents (I use uTorrent), and the fact that it has been shown that my internet can go twice that speed with my current hardware and internet plan.

Slow torrents are usually due to either having a router with NAT and no proper port forwards (just changing the client can help, or then make port forwards from the router to the computer) or then due to the ISP shaping traffic and giving torrents low priority. As mentioned, a lot of torrent clients these days have some kind of indicator in preferences showing if the connection is OK or not.

Ping sends UDP packages which don't have a resend mechanism. It's mainly for diagnosing network latency or bigger connectivity problems. If something is losing packets on the way then you won't get a ping response for all packages you send as it won't resend anything, however the ping packages (unless otherwise specified) are pretty small, so you are not really testing for throughput.

Downloads and web browsing (including speedtest) on the other hand use TCP packages. When you start downloading something it's sliced into small pieces. Each piece get's a specific ID before being sent, and the computer get's an acknowledgment (ACK response) that the package was also received. If it get's no ACK (or it's delayed too much) it will resend the package to ensure the other end can rebuild the file from the pieces in the correct order. For this reason a TCP connection will actually often start sending at a higher rate then your connection can handle, notice all packages are not going through and then throttle the connection until packages are not lost.

However another reason why at least browsers download speed indicators can show too high readings at the beginning of a download (though not so much these days) is that the download might have been started in the background already before you selected where to store it. The download speed indicator can calculate the average speed by looking at how long you downloaded it for and how much data you received, however it might not have taken this extra data into consideration (again, this was the case a few years ago, I have not noticed it lately).

The only kind of reliable download speed indicator on your computer would be something plugging into the NIC or kernel. Even they won't take into consideration if the download is successful, or if all the TCP packets are getting responses, they just count the rate of the flow of data.

Hey guys, we're all friends here... no need to get up in arms about misconceptions and such. Let's get back on track here

Since it's DSL, your MTU size on the router may be too high. Try dropping the MTU to 1492 and see if things speed up.

3Mbps will convert out to about 375KB/sec in maximum download speed. So that being said we should be able to determine if it's the PC, your ISP, or BitTorrent (BT) that is causing the slowness.

Try shutting off BT and go a speed test website to make sure you are getting your advertised speed. From there if everything looks good we can start focusing on your BT application.

BT is a heavy connection-oriented protocol, and can easily overload most consumer-level routers. If you're getting poor performance try limiting the amount of connections allowed in/out from your BT client. It may slow down the transfers from time to time, but at least your connectivity will work more often.

So this Hamachi stuff is a software VPN, and shows up as interface or NIC in your PC? When you bridge your connections all it does is group two separate interfaces into a single logical unit, so when devices on your network arp out for your IP Address either physical interface can answer for your system. Bridging the hamachi client with a physical interface will provide no added benefits to your internet speeds.

On a side note, you're not using your hamachi client to tunnel BT traffic through, are you?

FYI dropadrop - Pings (and most traceroutes) use ICMP packets, not UDP

I don't tunnel uTorrent traffic through hamachi, I always pause everything on uTorrent before testing speed (is that for this purpose the same as turning it off, or do I have to quit the process?), and I will repost when I know if your suggestion helped. I'm glad I could make the question answerable, and thank you for answering

1492 is the default. Should I lower it further, or let it stay there? In fact, would it help (after I fix this problem, which may mean getting a gigabit switch and U-Verse) to raise it? Many people complained of lag on my servers, and I can say with some degree of certainty that it is not my computer's processing power, as it is just minecraft, and I can still play on my server at 100-200 FPS.

Minecraft actually takes a surprising amount of processing power. The game alone tends to max out your processor, and the server can't use the GPU. With a good GPU, you may get 200 FPS even while the server's overloaded. My friend's new gaming laptop could only host 2-3 people while playing with vanilla, so we ended up using an old desktop as a dedicated server.

Oulse said:

Minecraft actually takes a surprising amount of processing power. The game alone tends to max out your processor, and the server can't use the GPU. With a good GPU, you may get 200 FPS even while the server's overloaded. My friend's new gaming laptop could only host 2-3 people while playing with vanilla, so we ended up using an old desktop as a dedicated server.

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That would be expected with the 100% destructible environment, but it hasn't shown true for me. I rarely break 30%, and even then, never 50%. Usually, that's while doing something else. One of my computer friends whose computer mine (in his words) "puts my [specs] to shame." Runs his server as a background task, with background priority. I lag, but if you've been forum-stalking me (I hope you haven't been, so here I've been having lag with most internet stuff recently. Also, he lives 500 miles away and is on a localized ISP (his own), so the signal changes hands a lot.

dropadrop said:

With a 4MB/s connection you should be able to download at about 400KB/s

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400 KB/s is 3.2 Mbit.