What's Making Transfers Slow?

[zenfool]

I may not be 100% up on everything network related, but I know that when I download a torrent from a legitimate site (linux distro per say) I can max out my 30megabit connection. when I FTP with multiple threads I can also usually max out my connection and when I use HTTPS I have no issues maxing out my connection.

 

I was excited to install btsync on a linux box that I currently SFTP into in order to retrieve files, and although the program install and setup was a breeze, it's just too slow to transfer large files on a daily basis with.

 

I'm maxing out at 300kB (kilobytes) and I see the occasional burst to 700 or 800kB, but nothing more or steady. Is it that the protocol, being adaptive as it is, is not aggressive enough?

 

Could there be an aggressive mode in the future or something to that nature? It would be extremely helpful to be able to download faster than I'm currently able to and really make this program shine.

[RomanZ]

Hi Zenfool,

 

When you start using btsync - where are other peers located? local network or behind your modem? How many of them? what is the maximum upload speed your peers has?

 

I can guess that your peers are using Asymmetric line and their upload speed is pretty humble, which means they just don't have enough outgoing bandwidth to fully load your incoming channel.

[zenfool]

Hi Zenfool,

 

When you start using btsync - where are other peers located? local network or behind your modem? How many of them? what is the maximum upload speed your peers has?

 

I can guess that your peers are using Asymmetric line and their upload speed is pretty humble, which means they just don't have enough outgoing bandwidth to fully load your incoming channel.

 

The only peer I'm connecting to can max my connection via FTP and SFTP, so that's definitely not it. Btsync states I'm directly connected and with regular bit torrent I can saturate my connection just fine. I definitely don't think I have a bandwidth issue here, but I could be missing something. The peer is not local and is over the WAN, beyond my firewall, although UPNP is working and the ports are open as I've tested that

 

Thanks for your response!

[RomanZ]

Okay, if you are able to load this bandwidth with FTP/SFTP from the same host, it is definitely not an issue.

 

Here goes other places I can think of:

1. BTSync behaves gently to the bandwidth, if you have some networking activity - BTSync will shrink it's traffic to not to interfere with other activities.

 

2. BTSync reads the disk while transferring data with the lowest priority to make sure it does not kill the performance on computer. This can be also a reason if you have some disk activity on the remote PC. This is something you can try to adjust in your settings on both computers (see advanced settings, disk_low_priority which you need to move to "false").

 

3. BTSync uses UDP protocol for data transfer, but I doubt that this is a reason of utilising only 10% of your bandwidth. Also, we are going to change this in future allowing TCP for even faster data transfer.

[zenfool]

Okay, if you are able to load this bandwidth with FTP/SFTP from the same host, it is definitely not an issue.

 

Here goes other places I can think of:

1. BTSync behaves gently to the bandwidth, if you have some networking activity - BTSync will shrink it's traffic to not to interfere with other activities.

 

2. BTSync reads the disk while transferring data with the lowest priority to make sure it does not kill the performance on computer. This can be also a reason if you have some disk activity on the remote PC. This is something you can try to adjust in your settings on both computers (see advanced settings, disk_low_priority which you need to move to "false").

 

3. BTSync uses UDP protocol for data transfer, but I doubt that this is a reason of utilising only 10% of your bandwidth. Also, we are going to change this in future allowing TCP for even faster data transfer.

 

 

Romanz,

 

Thank you for your reply. I've tried the disk access priority but that didn't seem to help. I think the issue we have here is the fact that btsync doesn't use TCP and it's being careful about the bandwidth. I think in future revisions a mode to make it more aggressive would be fantastic and adding TCP support would definitely speed things up (although introduce other things to worry about).

 

I will keep it on my server and update it periodically to check how the progress is coming, as of this latest release it's just not adequate for the large amount of files I'm transferring between peers.