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p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

IanM
Grafter
Posts: 38
Registered: ‎18-05-2008

p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

Hi,
I've recently noticed some odd behaviour when using BitTorrent at off peak times. It's as if I momentarily lose my internet connection at just after midnight and then again just after 1am. See the screen grab, that very sharp dip on the green line corresponds to approx. 1:05am when the download dropped from 110kB/s to almost 0.

On this occasion it ramped up again fairly quickly, but I've been observing this happening every night at the same times regardless of the current up/down speed or the number of active torrents. Same happens with uTorrent 1.7.7 & BitTorrent 6.0.3.
The ADSL connection is unbroken, so I checked Windows 'Event Viewer' & watched the list of processes in task manager, couldn't see any Windows services starting up at these times. There are no events in the router log either.
Now I know my router is held in quite low regard, it's a Netgear 834G v2 so this might be the problem, but given the very specific times these stalls occur, could the new PlusNet traffic shaping & prioritisation be causing something to reset at these times - momentarily throttling p2p traffic to zero?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or helpful advice,
Ian
5 REPLIES 5
zubel
Community Veteran
Posts: 3,793
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎08-06-2007

Re: p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

Looking at the traffic graph from the Ellacoyas shows the following:

There is a sharp drop in all traffic types at 1am on both consecutive days shown in the graph.  I wonder if Plusnet have a process scheduled for around that time every day?
Certainly at midnight the drop is likely to be caused by a surge in scheduled P2P transfers kicking off and the network saturates very quickly.  This 1am drop isn't so easily explained Smiley
B.
bobpullen
Community Gaffer
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Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

Hmmm, that is odd. I'm going to see if this trend spans back across any more days.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
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bobpullen
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Re: p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

Just found this. Looks like BT Wholesale have been conducting some pretty large-scale maintenance. I can't help but wonder if it's related to the drop in the graphing.
I can't find this particular graph in our monitoring systems so I can't check back any further at the moment. I'll give Tommo a nudge as he's probably in the best position to advise what he thinks the blip is down to.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
If I've been helpful then please give thanks ⤵

IanM
Grafter
Posts: 38
Registered: ‎18-05-2008

Re: p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

Quote from: Barry
There is a sharp drop in all traffic types at 1am on both consecutive days shown in the graph.  I wonder if Plusnet have a process scheduled for around that time every day?
Certainly at midnight the drop is likely to be caused by a surge in scheduled P2P transfers kicking off and the network saturates very quickly.  This 1am drop isn't so easily explained Smiley

Thanks for the graph Barry, the sudden change in traffic profiles at midnight makes sense. Maybe there is a 2nd smaller wave of scheduled downloads kicking in at 1am after people quit their late night gaming etc.
Quote from: Bob
Hmmm, that is odd. I'm going to see if this trend spans back across any more days.

I'm quite sure this has been happening for more than a couple of days. At first I assumed it was my router getting overloaded , or a bad choice of settings in my bt client. So I've been messing with this at least 4-5 consecutive evenings trying to optimise it from my side. So far no change on the the momentary speed loss, and if anything the overall available download speed for p2p has roughly halved during this time (used to get >200kB/s peak, now I'm lucky to get 120kB/s) Will try downloading an Ubuntu 8 ISO image to test that again later in the week.
Quote from: Bob
I can't find this particular graph in our monitoring systems so I can't check back any further at the moment. I'll give Tommo a nudge as he's probably in the best position to advise what he thinks the blip is down to.

Graph is the one from the Network Performance support pages?
http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/broadband_bandwidth_usage.shtml
bobpullen
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Re: p2p off peak - speed stalls regularly at approx 12:00am 1:00am etc

Quote from: IanM
Graph is the one from the Network Performance support pages?
http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/broadband_bandwidth_usage.shtml

It's the internal version I was looking for as I can alter the date range on that.
We're still looking into this, and as soon as I know more I'll report back.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
If I've been helpful then please give thanks ⤵