Rogers and BitTorrent: another datapoint

[Paul Nash]

>I knew it! And the most evil part of it is, their blocking affects your
>connection _in general_, ie. I was finding that as soon as I fired up
>Bittorrent, even browsing the Web was pointless,

Not necessarily.

Remember that your cable connection is asymmetric, so you should get
3-6Mbps inbound (to your home) but only about 400kbps outbound (to Rogers'
network).  If you use bittorrent, your PC will be pushing data out as well
as sucking it in.  As soon as the outbound traffic gets near the 400kbps
mark, you're hosed, as any *other* outbound traffic (HTTP requests, for
example) will be queued up waiting to go, and may wait a l_o_n_g time
before they get transmitted.

You can do cool things with PF and ALTQ to rate-limit your outbound
bittorrent traffic, which should speed things up dramatically.

	paul
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