My roommate takes up all my connections!

Rend

Ok, so here's the issue.

This has been happening for pretty much ever.

My apartment is a bunch of college-student-computer-users (huzzah!) and so we're all constantly on the internet. My roommate (we'll call him dan) likes to torrent stuff, though. He's the only one in the apartment that really does this, and none of us have a problem with it. There's only one problem-- any time his computer is connected to the internet, it presents serious connectivity issues with all the other computers on the network EXCEPT the DMZ host.

It is to the point where every 1-10 minutes, it will time out the game that I am playing, or the messenger service I am using, etc etc. I can't just put myself on DMZ, because there are 3 more of us that all play games and such, blah blah.

I've tried using the router to limit his bandwith and put everyone else on high priority, but that didn't work. It only happens when he's torrenting, though it seems to happen even if his download speeds are low (10kbps both ways, 20 kbps).

I can't figure out how to limit his computer so that he doesn't use up all my megahertz! Is there a way to accomplish this so that we don't have to do something silly like set up times he's allowed to have his downloads running, etc etc?

tl/dr: Roommate taking up all the bandwith with torrenting, i think. HOW I STOP THIS?!

Thank you. Thank you all very much.

Arikado

Have you talked to him at all? Sort of a "hey dood ur eating our tubez" or something.

I wouldn't go around trying to sabotage something unless it was a last resort. When I lived with 10 other people (!!!) in a house, we restricted heavy downloading to midnight-early daytime. We never had problems with this even with split Cable and DSL ports (7 and 4 respectively).

Doc

It's likely his upload speed that's killing you. Have him throttle it in his torrent app to 3kbps and see what happens.

Rend

Yeah, we've talked to him at length about it. We're trying to find a technical solution so everyone can be happy before we find a social solution which will be more difficult.

Doc: He says that his upload/download speeds are very low on some occasions where it's still giving me trouble. Would this still make a difference? Are uploads that much more cumbersome?

[edit] Not trying to sabotage anything, just trying to find a solution for everyone to do what they want at the same time.

Thanatos

What kind of router do you have, Rend? Is it a Netgear?

Rend

Thinatos wrote: »

What kind of router do you have, Rend? Is it a Netgear?

Linksys, the type escapes me, for I am a-working.

JPants

My house recently had this problem. We assumed it was our stupid middle of no where country DSL. We could get great speeds on everything but torrents... Whenever we torrented anything it would kill our net connection every 10 minutes or so and when it wasn't doing that the speed for everything else was terrible.

Turns out, there was some problem with the modem. It was set for doing DHCP, not in bridge mode, etc... Basically the modem was trying to act like a router. Once we fixed that (an a NAT issue) we can torrent fine and it doesn't kill the connection. We can download at high speeds w/o sacraficing performance on games and such.

So uh, check that.

Nibble

Most torrent programs have an option to limit the number of incoming and outgoing connections. See if that helps at all.

DeathPrawn

If you can't do any speed throttling on his computer, look into DD-WRT. It's open-source router firmware that allows you to do things like, say, cap the connection speed over ports that BitTorrent uses. I know you can use it with a bunch of Linksys routers, but worst case scenario the cheapest router you can install it on is $40.

Blake T

I know Azerus has an option to download stuff at set times, so maybe you can set it up to download alot during weekdays and from 12:01AM to 6 AM and just have full strength downloads the rest of the time.

Lewisham

If he's using Azereus, the AutoSpeed plugin can work wonders.

Rend

bitTorrent, I believe

Blake T

Rend wrote: »

bitTorrent, I believe

Bittorrents a shitty client (mind you I haven't used in it about 5 or 6 years so it may of changed since them. I would also get him to change his client.

Rend

It's bit-something, I don't know alot about torrenting, but the one he uses, far as I can tell, is pretty quality. I used one a long while in the past, the really crap one, so I'm probably mixing them up.

I know it's not azerius, though -_-

Lewisham

Well then he is going to have to man up and get it, otherwise you're all pretty shagged.

Gihgehls

Probably bitlord.

RNEMESiS42

Yeah man, Azureus rocks the pants.

Shogun

Azureus rocks but only if you square your NAT issues and it sounds like you have one. I could be wrong however.

X3x3non

Most torrent programs have an option to limit the number of incoming and outgoing connections. See if that helps at all.

Bit torrent used to slow my machine down this way. Windows has a limit of simultaneous connections imposed on any the computer it's installed on. I am not a network whiz, but I think that when torrents makes connections to a lot of other users, there aren't any left for other things. There is a way to manually fix it (but I think that would just open up more connections for him to torrent even more). So maybe there is a connection limit on the router as well. Dunno, try looking into that .

tsmvengy

I would bet it's the upload bandwidth. Do a speed test to figure out what your upload bandwidth is, then have him throttle his upload speed to a fraction of that (could be 50%.) If he has utorrent he could even set it up to have different limits at different times (i.e. in the middle of the night it can be unthrottled.) If he refuses to do this so that everyone else can actually use the internet, then every time it happens go into his room and ask him politely to stop using bittorrent while you need to do stuff. Perhaps he'll get the hint that him throttling his shit would be easier than having to do it himself every time you ask.