can someone explain to me / provide a link to an explanation of the phenomenon documentet in this screenshot? it's the download speed statistics, that never forms a straight line but rather shows a cyclical development with slowdowns between a plateau of okay speed.

thank you very much!
ungua

Dropped packets maybe, TCP will slowdown when packets are lost.

Another option is that the hash calculation of big chunks is slowing things down (though recent versions should handle this better). How big where the chunks on that torrent, and what version are you using ?

It could also be an extremely erratic peer, who has some weird choking behavior.

thank you for your reply!

ktorrent itself will slowdown every once in a while. when i try to minimize it, i am being ask if i want to continue running the program or end it. "running" results in that the program works again after a while. how do i determine the chunk size? these dropdowns have occurring with a lot of different torrents, i doubt it's a problem specific to a certain torrent. it's definitely not a peer, i have had this problem for weeks now with different peers. version is 2.2.1 - i have tried to install newer versions, but it won't work. not with yast, zen, kpackage or any other help. i have the same problem with amarok, which i desperately tried to update. i will have to set up the system anew during christmas, i really hope to find some time to do so.

the shapes are really characteristic: cycles2.

best regards
ungua

edit: could this be a router problem? though, downloads in firefox, konqueror and opera work well. i run opensuse 10.1.

You can see the chunk size on the Chunks tab.

Don't think this is a router problem, the fact that KDE starts asking if you want to end the program, means it isn't responding.

Start up ksysguard and keep an eye on the CPU usage of KTorrent, that is probably going to be very helpful.

fancy program! can i make it monitor ktorrent exclusively? a first look uncovers that "load average" follows the run-&-break-down cycles of ktorrent, as documented in this ksysguard-screenshot. this continues while i am writing here, with "cpu load" also painting the same picture. (fresh ktorrent screenshot)

right now i have one torrent downloading, none uploading. chunk size is 2.0 mb.

regards
ungua

edit: if this is of interest, too: process sheet. ktorrent never exceeded 1.5% of any while i was watching. and who is user "nobody"???
edit 2: now the notebook was "closed" for some time, ktorrent being the only application running - look at these very regular patterns: screenshot.

What about other processes ? Something has got to be using up the CPU.

i have seen nothing that catches my attention. just one konqueror-crash when i tried to open and close again a folder with a lot of pictures (.thumbnails). the process then caught 95% of the system column, but that is hardly a common situation. ktorrent is off now and i will wait and see if those valley-and-peak-formations come up, too.

regards
ungua

edit 1: same situation as above minus ktorrent: no cycles.
edit 2: one more question: i have one torrent at 710.5/712mb that has had a downloading speed at >150kb/s for two hours now, with "rest time" at 1 min. 54 s. neither the size of the torrent nor the "rest time" counter moved during these two hours. what is happening there!?

ungua wrote:i
edit 1: same situation as above minus ktorrent: no cycles.

Yes, but you do have spikes.

edit 2: one more question: i have one torrent at 710.5/712mb that has had a downloading speed at >150kb/s for two hours now, with "rest time" at 1 min. 54 s. neither the size of the torrent nor the "rest time" counter moved during these two hours. what is happening there!?

Hmm, is there anything strange in the log file, like corrupted chunks ?

but those spikes are much less accentuated. only ktorrent brings out those other formations... never mind, it works. i deleted the weird torrent that wouldn't finish and tried another one.

regards
ungua