Slow Download Speed While Playing Game

BitComet BitComet General Discussion
1

Hey guys, I am new to the forums. I just started using bitcomet about a month ago, and it is working great. Good download speeds, almost no bugs, and spyware free. I have only experienced one problem. When I am downloading, I get good speeds, but when I am playing a game while DL’ing it is different. Once I open a game, my DL’s slow to almost a complete halt. I don’t play games online while torrenting, but even offline single-player play causes bitcomet to slow. What could be causing this?

I am running Bitcomet 1.22 on Windows 7 64 bit. My anti-virus is AVG. I have AT&T DSL with a 5 MB connection. Speedtest just clocked it at 5.23 MB/s DL and 1.23 MB/s UL. I am using a motorola modem and a Linksys Wireless G router (WRTG50 - I think). I have not forwarded ports, but instead opened a DMZ. My usual download speeds on bitcomet range from 150 kb/s to 500 kb/s, depending on the seeds and peers. The only time it slows is when I have a game running (even if the game is not an online game).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi, there could be many causes for this, such as system resources, cpu time sharing, etc… but first lets make sure you have your client setup properly. You didn’t mention any of your bitcomet settings. If you have your max upload speed set to high, or unlimited, then you may have a situation where you have become slow to respond to peer requests because all your upload bandwidth is used, witch can lead to the best peers giving up on you and looking for peers that respond in a timely manner. The basic starting point is about 80% of your tested upload speed measured in Bytes (not bits)

Your upload speed isn’t 1.23mB/s, it’s 1.23mb/s. There is a huge difference here.

Your actual upload speed measured in Bytes is about 0.54mB/s, or 540kB/s. 80% of this would be 432kB/s, so this is a reasonable setting to use. However, some ISPs use techniques that boost your speed for you when they see you wanting more speed, but they only do so for short term, so you could test at 1.23mb/s in a short test, but might get much less sustained speed. I dropped Comcast for this very reason. In such a case, what you can do is observe how much upload bitcomet is giving on a very “hungry” torrent (one with lots of peers wanting your upload). This will give you a better Idea of what you speeds you can sustain.

Also, Most games are written to use high priority in it’s processes, where all p2p programs are designed to be lean and basically “get out of the way” when you want to do other stuff. You can adjust the priority of processes in “task manager”, but I don’t recommend it unless you know what your doing, so your on your own if you want to do that.

Also, you might want to check the support forum and/or FAQs for the game/s your playing. Others may have found the same problem and might have some solutions posted.

Other then that, I can’t really begin to give you anything certain without being there to observe your system. One thing I do recommend is that you take your computer out of DMZ and forward your port, or let uPnP do it “if” you can get it to work. In DMZ your totally relying on a software firewall to protect you, and they aren’t as reliable as a good router.

3

Thanks for the info. I read more into the whole mB/s vs MB/s and learned a lot. Thank you!

4

Actually you got it backwards, its mb/s vs. mB/s

lowercase “b” means “bits” and uppercase “B” means “Bytes”.

The smallest bit of information a computer processes is a “bit”. so if you take an optical disc like a CD/DVDrom disc, or even a harddrive, it has a lot of empty boxes that record binary data. Binary is a number system using only zero and one, as opposed to our system that uses 0 through 9, and each empty box is a zero, each filled box is a One.

Now, to make a alphanumeric character you need a total of 8bits, so we call that a Byte. One Byte can represent a letter or single digit number. This moves us into the system of human understanding. Computers can read binary much easier, but we need a much deeper system to construct letters and numbers.

So, your ISP advertises speeds in “bits”… why you might ask? simply because its a bigger number, and an 8megabit connection sounds faster then a 1megaByte connection, although they are the same.

Now, if you really want to get confused, in human mathematics, 1,000=1k… 1,000,000=1m… 1,000,000,000=1b… but since computers use exponents to simplify it’s calculations, 1000 isn’t a “round number” to a computer, so it counts 1024 to be equal to 1k… and 1m would be 1024 times 1024 or m=1,048,576… not 1,000,000.

This explains why a blank DVDr disc is advertised to be 4.70gb in size, but your computer says its only 4.38gb. In fact both numbers are correct because if your using the disc to record DVDrom data, then it is measure as k=1024, but other types of data an be written on it where k=1000, so the two measurements are both correct, however I wish they posted both sizes on the disc, it would save support personal a lot of effort trying to explain it.

If you wonder where 1024 came from, it’s simple, take 2 to the 10th power. 222222222*2=1024

Sounds complicated to us, but its beyond simple to a computer.

This is probably much more info then you wanted, but I hope you enjoyed it.