Chocolates and Data

[soc_puppet]

I went completely chocolate nuts this afternoon and made chocolate while watching (the first version of) The Producers. I'd have to agree with Dad in that everything was better in the remake--except for the lack of Gene Wilder. Anyway, chocolate. Made some more chocolate-hearts-onna-stick, half red vanilla-ish flavor, half dark chocolate. Then went completely batty and finally gave the banana, chocolate, and peanut butter thing a try, in the hopes that they would indeed be three great tastes that taste great together (instead of just remaining three sets of two great tastes that taste great together). It seems to have worked magnificently, though I should probably up the peanut butter for the next batch and make it something more like a 1:1 ratio with the chocolate. Had lots of extra peanut butter-chocolate mix left over, so I sliced an apple and coated that as well. It's also nice, a quick juicy spike of sour to balance out the sweet, though I think the banana may be the favorite. Still had leftover peanut butter chocolate mix, so just poured it into a mold. It's hard to tell it from the dark chocolate, but that won't be a problem for some of us ;) Now my only problem will be trying to keep from eating all of this...

Downloaded a new BitTorrent client thanks to help in the previous post and getting used to it again. Thanks to those who offered advice and suggestions ^_^ I'm currently giving it a trial run with a manga I had wanted to download earlier but hadn't been able to. It seems to be working pretty well so far.

Edit: Okay, Azureus is working fine for me, mostly. See, the thing is, my cable modem? Has an issue where it goes wonky every now and then. I'll be surfing the net or decide to refresh a page and suddenly, whammo, bad connection. As in, the connection between the wire and the device is lost. The PC link: Activity and Cable: Activity lights go off, the Cable Modem: Status light flickers orange, and then it and the PC Link: Status light flicker off for a few seconds, then flicker on again, and the first two lights come back to life. Mostly I've noticed when refreshing my friends page, or when I'm checking my mail after letting my computer sit for a while. Trouble is, the disconnect interrupts downloads, which is really really annoying. It was why I couldn't download anything from YSI over 100 MB before getting YSI Get (and why I still can't upload anything very big--is there, by any chance, an upload manager in the world?). Anyway, long story short, it does not like big downloads, torrents included. Every time it goes wonky, I lose the connection with the seeders and peers, and it's a real pain to get it started again. Anyone know how I can fix this, or even what the problem is? It seems to happen more often when I have a large torrent running, for some reason. (I know it's unlikely, but I figure that at least three computer-savy people read this journal, and maybe they'd have an inkling at least.)

Comments

[cucarache.livejournal.com]

I've never had a cable modem, but from what I understand, this is common behavior among cable modems with default settings. While I don't recall the details offhand, I believe the resolution to this matter has to do with throttling back the upload speed cap on the cable modem. The reasoning for this was that the cable modem is being swamped with communications control packets when you are both downloading full tilt and uploading to capacity, overloading some buffer in the cable modem. Perhaps one of those computer-savvy persons to whom you refer would be better able to explain this than I, as I, to reiterate, have never had a cable modem. Anyway, look at your cable modem configuration and see if there is some way of artificially capping the upload speed and whether such cap can be lowered.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, here's a little bit more in-depth response lifted from a local text based computer bulletin board service (BBS), this one is run by the Iowa Student Computing Association (ISCA) and is called ISCABBS...

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Jan 24, 2006 10:57 from Hedon
Bit torrent and losing DNS> in the last week or two, out of the blue, my bit torrent client has caused my router to lose all ability to look up DNS. I've verified that it is bit torrent and it doesn't matter if I'm using azureus or bit comet. I've found a few threads dealing with this and they suggest a few things, none of which have fixed the problem. Is it possible that my isp (comcast) is intentionally doing something? I'm just confused as to why in the past I could have 40 torrents running with default settings and no problems, now my whole network goes to poop.
[INet FTP Download Telnet IRC> msg #74992 (125 remaining)] Read cmd -> Next

Jan 24, 2006 11:00 from Agf
Nope, it's your router being overwhelmed, basically. Totally common thing. You're downloading too many things at once, basically, probably at full outbound tilt, too. The solution is to power cycle your router. This should not affect any settings.

Preventing it from reoccuring:
Limit your uploading speed to approx. 80% of your total outbound bandwidth. Reduce the number of torrents you download at once. 3-4 for typical broadband at a time is about right, as I understand it, but I tend to go no higher than 3 at once, usually.

The other benefit of reducing your uploading speed is you'll actually get faster downloads than if you left all your outbound bandwidth available.
[INet FTP Download Telnet IRC> msg #74993 (124 remaining)] Read cmd -> Next

Jan 24, 2006 11:31 from Danix
I limit my uploads on anything I've got to 2 Kb/s. I've found out that if your upload is maxed out, downloads and just about everything craps out!
[INet FTP Download Telnet IRC> msg #74994 (123 remaining)] Read cmd -> Next

Jan 24, 2006 11:39 from Wang Master
it sorta makes sense if you think about it. your system has to send acknowledgement packets for inbound communication. Many times the other side won't send the next packet til the ack is received.

your upload pipe can only send so much data at a time. if you try to pump to much through the upload pipe, you're going to end up with queueing. This will increase latency..

by allocating less than full bandwidth to an application, you always have hte headroom (well not always, because you can still saturate the headroom) to send out acknowledgement packets. This should help significantly with interactive network use.

[INet FTP Download Telnet IRC> msg #74995 (122 remaining)] Read cmd -> Next

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If anyone should be interested in checking out this BBS, it is available at telnet://bbs.isca.uiowa.edu

[cucarache.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry, that long post from ISCABBS was me again...

[soc_puppet]

Thanks ^_^ I'll give that a shot, see if it works.