On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:57 AM, Mike Pfaiffer
<high.res.mike@gmail.com> wrote:
Give it a try. Grab a movie or something. Use a bittorrent client
capable of capping the up and down speed. Ktorrent can do this. See what
you can get for both up and down uncapped. Then try running say Firefox
and look at its performance. Stop the bittorrent transfer and look at
Firefox again in a few minutes. Set up a cap in bittorrent say 10K on
both the up and down (bear in mind this is supposed to be a
multi-megabit connection). Restart your bittorrent and see what happens
with Firefox. You'll notice the bittorrent will transfer to what ever
maximum you set while other programs will barely function on the
internet. Local transfers on the LAN are fine though.
Like you, I haven't done any formal testing, but my wife has uT going non stop and I haven't had any problems with my download speed unless she forgets to cap her upstream. uT is running forced encryption, FWIW.
It's almost a certainty that Shaw has DPI policies dealing with torrent. I'm not disputing what you're seeing, but correlation does not equal causation.
As a start, try doing some Wireshark I/O graphs on the various streams with and without a torrent running. Do the bandwidth of the non torrent flows change? Is there a change in the TCP setup times? Are ACK packets being delayed? Are you seeing loss?
Sean