PCA Forums

I got cable recently as some know... Last night i was downloading some files had 3 of them going for a combined 90k... A buddy asked me to send him a file so i was sending via ICQ and my bandwidth went all to hell... upload was 15k which it shoudl be for a 128kbs upload my downloads dropped down to about 25k... Is this normal if your downloading and uploading at the same time... I mean i'm sure it would drop some but i lost 2/3's of my dl speed. My down is capped at 768kbs. Any idea's or suggestions on how to fix this would be appreciated.

What probably happened was when you were uploading you were eating of the available upstream bandwidth. TCP told the other end of the download connections to slow down because there was line congestion. Get more upstream bandwidth is the way to fix it and that's probably not going to happen so you just have to live with it. You can do speed tweaks and whatever and might be able to improve things a little but TCP/IP is just working like it is supposed to.

15k sounds right. Your upload is capped at 128 Kilobits per second, not kilobytes. Divide 128 by 8 to get your kilobyte value. As for the drop in speed, I dunno, I don't think that it should happen.

Basically, when downloading, every once in a while you're sending a packet to the server you're downloading from saying "yes, I got that, sent me more".

When you fully tied up your upload bandwidth, it affected your downloads indirectly because confirmation signals weren't getting through in a timely manner.

That makes sense FP.. And busby i know about Kilobits and kbytes... I knew my upload would be about 15k max. Getting more upload bandwidth won't be possible unless i go to 11Mbsup and down wireless connection but thats a little too spendy for my blood. Our cable company here sucks... 45.95 a month for a 768/128 connect and some bitch about being capped at 1.5Mbs i'd love to have that speed... I still pisses me off that when i try upload my download goes all to shit... You would think it wouldn't affect it much i could see a 10-20k drop but losing 50k of my download speed is bs.

If you do that situation again...
Just limit that ICQ transfer...there is a slider bar and bump it down abit to allow the 'verification packets' from your download to come thru.
bring it down abit and transfer to your friend to 10k or something .. .that will alow a little bandwith for the <I>"yes, I got that, sent me more"</I> FP is talking about.