Hi

After not running kTorrent for a few months, I started it up on Saturday, usng the new version 2.1 beta 1.

It ran for a few hours, and according to the traffic stats in the bottom right hand corner, my total traffic was about 90MB or so.

However, I noticed the LAN traffic lights were constantly flickering, even when the kTorrent screen showed no traffic up or down.

Worse, according to my ISP, I used over 1 GB of traffic on Saturday:
date download upload
9 1.1785 GB 59.654 MB

This is a problem for me since my monthly limit is 3 GB... and on Sunday I had kTorrent running most of the day, based on using about 100MB for the day. So I'm probably over my limit already...

When I close kTorrent, the LAN lights stop flickering immediately.

So... why is there such a discrepancy between the actual traffic, and what is reported in the bottom right hand corner?

Is kTorrent now working like Skype, and acting as a go-between for other nodes on the net?

Thanks. Sorry if this is a clueless newbie question, I'm a relative newbie at torrents.

i noticed that too... i'm no coder, but my guess would be that perhaps ktorrent's DHT is buggy? what happens when you disable it?

AMB wrote:i noticed that too... i'm no coder, but my guess would be that perhaps ktorrent's DHT is buggy? what happens when you disable it?

When I started it up it was off, then I fiddled with the settings, and put it on (without actually knowing what it was or how it worked, other than it would 'find more peers', which I thought may be a Good Thing (tm)'). At some stage after that I noticed the flickering lights, and then switched it off... this failed to stop the traffic.

So I don't know if it only started after I switched DHT on, but I do know that the traffic is still going bazonkers, even though DHT is off and I've restarted kTorrent a few times (it's off now, can't afford the bandwidth ...)

cheers, Ian

First of all, not all traffic is data, so if ktorrent says it has download 90 MB, the actual number is allways higher. There are control messages being sent, between peers, furthermore TCP and IP will add some overhead to each packet.

Though this should not result in 1.1 GB, because that is way to much.

I have checked my ISP's traffic logs and everything seems to be normal. There does not seem to be an excess amount of traffic.

When I started it up it was off, then I fiddled with the settings, and put it on (without actually knowing what it was or how it worked, other than it would 'find more peers', which I thought may be a Good Thing (tm)'). At some stage after that I noticed the flickering lights, and then switched it off... this failed to stop the traffic.

So I don't know if it only started after I switched DHT on, but I do know that the traffic is still going bazonkers, even though DHT is off and I've restarted kTorrent a few times (it's off now, can't afford the bandwidth ...)

Even if you switch of DHT other peers who still have your IP address in their DHT table can decide to contact you.

Though, it would be very surprising if DHT would create this much traffic. A comparison would be usefull.

George wrote:First of all, not all traffic is data, so if ktorrent says it has download 90 MB, the actual number is allways higher. There are control messages being sent, between peers, furthermore TCP and IP will add some overhead to each packet.

Yes, I am aware of that...

Though this should not result in 1.1 GB, because that is way to much.

Precisely...

Even if you switch of DHT other peers who still have your IP address in their DHT table can decide to contact you.

Okay, I would consider that a bug... if I switch off DHT (still not sure what DHT is exactly... tho wikipedia contains this worrying description: "Gnutella and similar networks moved to a flooding query model — in essence, each search would result in a message being broadcast to every other machine in the network" -- which looks like a recipe for lots of traffic...) then surely that means I don't want to use it anymore, and thus other nodes should stop trying to get stuff from me? The traffic was mostly incoming ( 1.1785 GB vs 59.654 MB outgoing).

For the record, my ISP resets my connection every 24 hours, so I get a new IP address every 24 hours, but still the traffic is continuing.

Though, it would be very surprising if DHT would create this much traffic. A comparison would be usefull.

And how do I do such a comparison?

So... is there a problem? and how do I fix it? Or should I use another bittorrent client in the mean time?

thanks, Ian

iandoug wrote:Worse, according to my ISP, I used over 1 GB of traffic on Saturday:
date download upload
9 1.1785 GB 59.654 MB

Got the traffic numbers for Sunday, and it's even worse than Saturday (which I expected, since I ran kTorrent for longer):

date downloaded uploaded
1 418.6015 MB 49.8765 MB
2 56.7711 MB 5.2296 MB
3 32.065 MB 3.7899 MB
4 169.1374 MB 11.3009 MB
5 100.4863 MB 9.6458 MB
6 114.2098 MB 10.8352 MB
7 97.9369 MB 28.0241 MB
8 75.8947 MB 30.3582 MB
9 1.1785 GB 59.654 MB
10 2.4155 GB 83.247 MB

Only thing different on Sat and Sun was kTorrent. Traffic on the 1st was higher because I was downloading stuff via the web, and had to upload stuff on the 1st and 9th.

So if anyone can tell me how to fix this, I'd appreciate it

Cheers, Ian

Could this be related to that tracker scraping bug where the tracker would send back everything it knows about every torrent it's hosting?

jdong wrote:Could this be related to that tracker scraping bug where the tracker would send back everything it knows about every torrent it's hosting?

Okay, am not familiar with this bug, but the gist of your message touches on something I suspected.... I store the torrents and their files in a "downloads" directory. Although I only had some torrents active in kTorrent (some downloading, some sharing until a suitable share ratio was reached), I have scores more torrents, both completed and 'yet to start' stored in the same folder.

So I was wondering if kTorrent had found those and decided to download them anyway... even though they were not loaded in the active window.

Cheers, Ian

iandoug wrote:So I was wondering if kTorrent had found those and decided to download them anyway... even though they were not loaded in the active window.

On the other hand, since I suspected the above, I moved all the torrent files to a different directory (via Konqueror), and restarted kTorrent, but still the flashing lights tell me there is a lot of traffic...

So I dunno

Cheers, Ian

try to use a network traffic analyzer (jnettop) to see what's up.

dierbro wrote:try to use a network traffic analyzer (jnettop) to see what's up.

Okay, installed that (but not the gui) and started up kTorrent... screen immediately filled with lots of activity, many of the form

Code: Select all

GET /scrape?infohash=W%7d%b3V%b8%84w%94%f1%0f%ff%88%24C%ac%5e~_)k


As well as a reasonable high download rate (I saw 26KB/sec, my bandwidth is around 50KB/sec), even though nothing on the kTorrent screen was downloading.

So what does that mean, and what should I be looking for in jnettop?

thanks, Ian

Code: Select all

GET /scrape?infohash=W%7d%b3V%b8%84w%94%f1%0f%ff%88%24C%ac%5e~_)k


This says, that your computer asks the tracker for a **** of info about some torrents, and probably gets an even bigger **** of data in response
Are the infohashes different or all the same? Maybe you can even identify the torrents that are being requested?

iandoug wrote:

dierbro wrote:try to use a network traffic analyzer (jnettop) to see what's up.

Okay, installed that (but not the gui) and started up kTorrent... screen immediately filled with lots of activity, many of the form

Code: Select all

GET /scrape?infohash=W%7d%b3V%b8%84w%94%f1%0f%ff%88%24C%ac%5e~_)k


As well as a reasonable high download rate (I saw 26KB/sec, my bandwidth is around 50KB/sec), even though nothing on the kTorrent screen was downloading.

So what does that mean, and what should I be looking for in jnettop?

thanks, Ian

This is the bug jdong mentioned, due to some confusion with some specs (they were saying different things), we originally used infohash to specify the torrent we are interested in, in the scrape request.

This works for some trackers, but not for all, some only support info_hash and if they see infohash they will just ignore it and return all data of all torrents that tracker is handling. This can be a lot of data if the tracker is for example the pirate bay tracker.

We have now switched to info_hash, and this seems to work fine.

So you will need to install a recent weekly snapshot if you do not want to suffer this bug.

Okay, I would consider that a bug... if I switch off DHT (still not sure what DHT is exactly... tho wikipedia contains this worrying description: "Gnutella and similar networks moved to a flooding query model — in essence, each search would result in a message being broadcast to every other machine in the network" -- which looks like a recipe for lots of traffic...) then surely that means I don't want to use it anymore, and thus other nodes should stop trying to get stuff from me? The traffic was mostly incoming ( 1.1785 GB vs 59.654 MB outgoing).

DHT is not connection oriented so there is no way to tell other people that you are gone (it's not really needed). And it doesn't use a flooding query model like Gnutella.

George wrote:This works for some trackers, but not for all, some only support info_hash and if they see infohash they will just ignore it and return all data of all torrents that tracker is handling. This can be a lot of data if the tracker is for example the pirate bay tracker.

Okay, I use piratebay, and I would consider 3 GB and counting to be 'a lot of data'

George wrote:We have now switched to info_hash, and this seems to work fine.

So you will need to install a recent weekly snapshot if you do not want to suffer this bug.

Am on Gentoo, so will need to wait for them to release an update, presumably when you release a new beta....

So I'll wait... thanks for the help

Cheers, Ian