Slow file transfer to and from Bubba

aliquis · Post by **aliquis** » 15 Nov 2007, 06:58

I got my Bubba six days ago. It was working fine (but slow) up until yesterday, when I had to restart it.

I main problem is with the speed. The speed of my torrents is about a tenth of what I had expected with regard to my other computers at home. (But with torrents you never know for sure – I thought I had come across some really slow ones.) Today I downloaded a file from Bubba using SSH. It was about 175MB in size. The average speed was 37.6kB/s and the total time 1 hour and 27 minutes. Using the same hardware, but my old Linux computer instead of Bubba, I have never before gone below 1MB/s, no matter what the Linux computer was doing in the meantime. I had an active torrent, downloading with about 60kB/s, but it went down to practically nothing after having run my SSH download for a while.

This is really annoying! I never imagined I was buying a fast computer, but I thought that transferring files should be fairly fast anyway. 37.6kB/s inside a LAN using shielded cables is unacceptable for any practical use, from my point of view.

I have not done anything special to my Bubba that I am aware of. I have installed Emacs, PostgreSQL (but am not using any database so far), Mono (not being used either) and maybe something more. However, torrent downloads and uploads have been slow the entire time. Yesterday, when I removed a seeding torrent using the web interface from school, the interface froze. I could reach the root directory of Apache2, and it still displayed the page I wanted, but nothing in /web-admin. After a while (maybe an hour) I could reach the /web-admin again, but as soon as I clicked on Downloads it froze again in the same way. I did the same a few times more before I run

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shutdown -r now

Having restarted Bubba, Apache2 did not seem to start until I had entered ServerName in httpd.conf and run

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/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Reload and restart did not seem to work either. Then I noticed (using top) that FTD was taking every last bit of the CPU for a very long time. I do not now what the program does, but after a while I grew tired of it and killed it. After having killed it and restarted it a couple of time everything seemed fine again.

I never have more than 2MB of RAM available, but the is just the way it should be, right? (It was like that even before I began tampering with it.) It also seems that the Downloads page never displays the real size of large uploads, just wrapping at slightly above 4GB, correct?

Does anyone know what to do?

By the way, what does FTD do, and are there differences between /etc/init.d/ftd and /usr/sbin/ftd? Maybe I restarted the wrong program.

Thanks!

rasel · Post by **rasel** » 15 Nov 2007, 11:16

Hi aliquis,

FTD is file transfer daemon, responsible for the downloads of bubba. Excito confirms that it is a little buggy and working on a new version already.
When I get a ftd problem, I always start /etc/init.d/ftd, don't know the other one.

Regards.

pa · Post by pa » 19 Nov 2007, 02:36

Hi,

Regarding transfer speeds, Bubba is not the fastest on the market, but the speeds that you report are off by a factor 10.
What usually is the cause for these problems is a DNS-setting that does not work as it should, some lookups does not work correctly. Are you running static och dynamic network configuration? Can you verify that the settings are correct?

Also, regarding FTD, there is a thread here: http://excito.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9 that discusses ftd. In order to get the maximum out of your downloads, be sure to forward ports 10000-14000 in your firewall. The "continious" crash of ftd you are describing has to do with that ftd looks in your torrent directory for any incomplete downloads, and if the same torrent that caused it to crash is still there, ftd will crash again... The solution is to remove all files in the torrent directory "/home/user/torrents".

Regards
PA Nilsson

aliquis · Post by **aliquis** » 21 Nov 2007, 18:03

Thank you for your answers, both of you!

I forwarded the wrong ports up until now. It works much better now. I tried to download a couple of random torrents, and they uploaded with a total of about 700kB/s.

After the successful attempt with torrents I stopped seeding and just tried to downloaded one of the files within my LAN. With SSH Secure Shell connecting to the local IP address (192.168.1.9) I reached a speed of about 36kB/s. I then tried to download from /web-admin using Firefox. Connecting to the public IP address using my domain name I reached about the same speed as with SSH Secure Shell locally. When I connect directly to 192.168.1.9 the speed varies between 80kB/s and 150kB/s. Samba seems to vary as well.

I do not really understand what you mean by "DNS settings". Do you mean LAN or Internet names? The Internet domain name has always worked before. I do not know if my router has a DNS, but I could not find any settings. However, connecting directly to the IP address should always work, right?

By the way, my torrents directory is always empty. Why?

Thanks!

Post by **tor** » 03 Dec 2007, 04:02

Hi aliquis,

Sorry to hear about your bandwidth problem. I can only say as PA. The throughput you are describing are way of what would be normal for a Bubba.

Its obvious that your unit have no problems with connecting outbounds since you get good values on torrent downloads. And since you are using IP numbers when connecting DNS might not be the problem At least not if download starts immediately.

But to get further investigating this i think we need to know a bit more on what your network topology looks like. Do you have any routers in between you and Bubba? Any wireless network etc.

/Tor

habrys · Post by **habrys** » 03 Dec 2007, 10:35

Hi aliquis,

I've done some testing concerning transfer rates of my bubba w while ago. Take a look here, to get a feeling what should be possible.

daveyallan · Post by **daveyallan** » 11 Jan 2008, 21:36

Hey guys,

I've only recently started getting into my bubba even though it's been in a box on my floor for months! I must say, so far i'm pretty impressed, certainly with it's ease of installation and formatting.

Anyway, about these file transfer speeds. I noticed my speeds would start off pretty fast, around the 4-5MB/s mark, then would gradually slow down until I would be getting about 700K/s. I noticed this when I was attempting to copy a dvd image over to my desktop through a wired link (via a standard router with open firewall to internal access).

I use NFS to connect my boxes together but no matter what i did the speeds always followed the same profile. Using ssh, not using ssh, issuing the cp command to my main box, issuing it to the bubba. Nothing prevented the speed from slowing. Even trying to go through the web interface had no effect.

I did some digging in these forums and started investigating my processor usage. The bubba was fine, cp was only using 3% tops but my main pc (AMD x2 3 gig) was maxing out with my World Community Grid taking all the cycles. I thought "no way is that causing my slow downloads" but as soon as I stopped that the speeds were good. I'm just about to complete a 4.3 gig transfer in about 15 mins.

Another thing that may have slowed it is writing to ntfs on my linux box. It seems that the code i use to allow linux to write to ntfs (ntfs-3g) isn't perfect. Often that maxes out my cpu cycles.

So really, the moral of the story is to stop all cycle hungry processes on both the bubba and the destination. Don't always think the bubba is to blame!

aliquis · Post by **aliquis** » 11 Mar 2008, 05:15

tor wrote:But to get further investigating this i think we need to know a bit more on what your network topology looks like. Do you have any routers in between you and Bubba? Any wireless network etc.

I am sorry for the late answer. I have had too much to do recently.

I bought a new router. For some strange reason, connecting to the Bubba via my wireless router, instead of via cable to my old router, made all the difference. The settings were (except for the new router) everywhere the same, using the same programs and the same static IP address for the Bubba.

It would be interesting to know what was the problem, but sadly I do not think I have the time to investigate it. Unfortunatly, my new (and quite expensive) NetGear FVG318 router stops working now and then, requiring at least a manual reboot to start working again. In the meantime, the Bubba is disconnected from the outside world. I live abroad during the spring, which makes for a very difficult situation for me, as I have my e-mail on the Bubba. However, I have no reason to expect that the Bubba is causing the problems. I guess there is simply no such thing as the ideal situation...