How Online Bandwidth Testers Work...

[tomkear2006]

When I use a bandwidth tester is it testing the speed of the internet connection between the outside world and the router...or is the outside work to my PC?

The reason I ask is because I sometimes get a slow internet connection but my housemate reports that hers is fine. My signal is strong and connected at 54Mb/s and neither of us is using the line intensly. She uses MSN and I am just browsing and finding sometimes it takes a fair amount of time for a page to load.

2.2Mb/s Cable internet.

[tomkear2006]

When I run any form or P2P software it makes my internet connection really slow...even when the torrents are only downloading at like 2Kb/s.

Is this normal? :S

I think I just found out what's going on. My upload speed is getting maxed out by the P2P software meaning that my requests for web pages are really slow. I have just reduced the upload speed massively and am waiting to see how that works for me :)

[klick81]

the p2p software is probably the problem. anytime you download anything from the internet (software, video, music, or a www page for example) it is broken up into packets, your computer has to initiate the download by requesting the file, then once the transfer is started every few packets it has to send back a msg to the "sender computer" saying 'OK i got these, send some more' the more upload bandwidth you are using when these acknowledgement (ACK) packets/msgs are sent to the sender computer the longer it will take to get them out, which means you will get a noticeably slower connection.
i dont know if explained that well, but its kinda like a street/roadway. if there's no traffic going in your direction you are free to go as fast/soon as you want. if there's a thousand other cars going the same way, you're gonna have to wait.

[tomkear2006]

I understand how a torrent download works, I just wasn't aware that my upload speed was being maxed out, there was no column (by default) to show what speed I was uploading at.

Now that I have identified the upload speed as being the cause of the problem I have limited it to only 6Kb/s upload and left the download as it was. This appears to have resolved the problem, the downloads in Bittorrent are holding a good 50 - 60Kb/s and I can see no noticeable slowdown with browsing :)