deluge brings my home network to a stand still

Specific support for Deluge on Microsoft Windows OS
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unknownerrors
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deluge brings my home network to a stand still

Post by unknownerrors »

A little system info before we get started.
I use Private Internet Access with a split tunnel enabled. Deluge is the ONLY program that I have routed to PIA, all other traffic is set to bypass the VPN.
Deluge settings: Max connections 150, Max Download Speed 1Mb, Max Upload Speed unlimited (although I rarely see over 300/500 Mb usage)

Without Deluge running I can do an internet speed test from any system on my network and get a result of 100Mbps down and 10Mbps up, Which is what I should see for what I pay for. As soon as I open Deluge my connection speed drops like a ROCK. suddenly I'm seeing 300/500kbps down and my upload seems to be unaffected. again, a week ago this wasn't happening. nothing in my network topology has changed, no settings in my VPN have changed. I'm wondering if my ISP has found a way to throttle users who use BitTorrent, which I thought was illegal. The only reason I am leaning toward my ISP is that they have been doing network maintenance nearly every other night starting at 12 am and normally finishing up by 1 am for the past couple of weeks. But even if that were the case, this is why I have a VPN, right? In theory, my ISP shouldn't be able to see my deluge traffic as it's all on the VPN.

[edit]
forgot to mention that I'm using Deluge Ver. Client: 1.3.15, libtorrent: 1.0.11.0 since that's one of the few versions that the private tracker I use supports
[/edit]
mhertz
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Re: deluge brings my home network to a stand still

Post by mhertz »

A VPN should bypass throttling/traffic-shaping from ISP, agreed.

I did a quick search, and read a couple Google hits and seemingly there is several people that have like minded issues with PIA and deluge, and the issues seemingly stems from either PIA's VPN software, or a compatibility problem with certain other component, e.g malwarebytes network-shield or killer(to lazy Google what the f that is lol), or other anti-virus or packet-filtering app or even network-card-driver sometimes install "callout-driver" interferring with PIA and so needs disabling. Finally the dns by default is PIA's, for also excluded apps, which brings extra latency/slowdown some have reported(I'm thinking if an ISP can see your dns somehow, as I'd guess it can catch your presumably http(s) get command to said IP, and hence throttle you, but not a networking guy, so clueless about it, and again to lazy to further lookup) - it can be changed in app as own or custom or something like that, reportedly. About the PIA app, then several stated there connection had slowdown issues with split-tunnel feature, after v1.8, and v1.7 worked perfectly(and also has split-tunnel feature).

Unrelated probably, as happened only recently, but I'd update to latest libtorrent 1.1.14, curtesy of MikeMelbAustralia, which himself got CPU-spike issues with your used libtorrent, making fans run high, but also just might as well use newest possible with whatever fixes added regardless: viewtopic.php?t=55859

If your tracker really imposses also on libtorrent version, then can change it easily with ltconfig plugin(or direct code-change).
unknownerrors
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Re: deluge brings my home network to a stand still

Post by unknownerrors »

Thank you for all your time looking into this.

The strangest thing solved the issue. I had a 5 port unmanaged switch in the network segment where my personal PC is located that operated fine until I placed it under intense loads, like deluge. replacing the switch fixed me right up. I'm still not sure how a faulty switch could affect network segments that are not behind it, but I'm no network tech either..

I feel like a complete moron for not catching that in my troubleshooting. in any case sorry to have wasted your time.
mhertz
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Re: deluge brings my home network to a stand still

Post by mhertz »

You're very welcome, and no worries in the slightest, just happy you've found the culprit and gotten it solved, would never have cought that myself I'd suspect so good job :)

Thanks for reporting back with solution also, never know who else stumbles upon same issue later.

I've heard before some cheap bad routers could break e.g using ltconfig high-performance seed preset and presumably why set rather concervatively by default to mitigate(connection_speed setting, controlling tcp outgoing connection attempts per sec, 30 default in libtorrent, 20 in default deluge, in older times 10, probably why, and finally 500 in high-performance seed preset), so strange overloaded anyway, but whatever, not important.
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