The Silent Room

After TMNet began throttling high-bandwidth users, and filtering bittorrent clients’ user agents, many p2p users [including yours truly] have suffered quite a bit in terms of torrenting for our regular dose of TV shows/anime/etc. However, the community of BT users in Malaysia aren’t so easily disheartened and many of us have found a work-around to the user-agent filtering [thanks Silverhawk of Lowyat.net! j00 ish teh pwn!]

However, eventhough I was capable of connecting to international trackers thanks to the proxy, it still doesn’t solve the bandwidth throttling problem. However, I noticed something quite significant on this matter.

Whenever I restarted Luna, and let the uTorrent run, I can get a rather surprising total download speed.

I could hit that speed even without running the PAW proxy server. However, after about 3-4 hours [as estimated from the speed vs time graph on uTorrent], the total download speed got down to about 0.5-2kbps.

Thinking that it was the modem overheating [as it usually does, my MSN and Yahoo would keep disconnecting when that happens], I restarted it but the connection was still poor. I was updating some software on Luna, when it was time to reboot.

Upon restart, uTorrent launches again, and in a matter of minutes, I got this speed.

I tried doing this again over the course of 24 hours, rebooting once very 5-6 hours, and I got the very same results every single time. However, one night when some TNB staff were playing pong with my neighbourhood’s power junction box [whatever the hell you call it], we suffered some instant blackouts and power spikes.

Which resulted in my PC rebooting once every 20-30 minutes. The first reboot got me to the 50+kbps range, but consequent reboots after that yielded less than 5kbps average.

I don’t really understand what’s going on, and my knowledge of networking and connectivity is still very limited. If you know what’s going on, and can make use of this finding, do let me know.