Share files if your ISP is blocking your uploads?
 

Hi all,

I was curious about whether it's still worthwhile to allow people to upload from you when your ISP is restricting your upload capacity. I'm with Shaw Cable, and they've cut back the uploads so that they only allow 64KB at a time. So someone connects, gets 64KB, aborts, reconnects for another 64KB, aborts, ...wash, rinse, repeat.

I've left it running for 48hours straight and people have uploaded 2GB from me, so in the aggregate it's still productive.

I'd like to hear opinions about whether this may cause more harm than good though. I'm thinking I may actually be decreasing the efficiency of the network since the software may pass up the chance to D/L from faster connections and pick me instead. Maybe it's better for me to just not share at all?

Any thoughts?

My opinion is sharing something is better than sharing nothing, especially with rare files. Eventually it will propagate the network, not everyone is blocked that way.

How about if the files are commonly held? :)

Like I said sharing anything better than not sharing.

So do you know for a fact that the presence of slow upload users doesn't degrade the performance of the network, or are you just guessing? Say there are 100 possible sources in a search, how does the Limewire client pick amongst them? Is it going to routinely pass on sources that can give a continuous upload stream for crappy upload rates from people in my situation?

The safe thing is obviously to just share everything, but I'm interested in the optimal decision. I don't know enough about the program's internal workings to make a judgement.

the optimal solution would be to sign up with the competition who don't filter uploads.

The DSL telcos and the cableco's are competing pretty hard, so you should be able to sign up for one of those free (or really cheap) 6 month deals. I had to do that twice, and eventually my cableco lifted the upload throttles, so I was able to cancel the DSL trials. Kinda nice having two ISP's at the same time, anyway :)

BTW--see if Shaw is using the Sandvine system to control filesharing. It's meant to shape usage, but I found it just disrupted transfers and caused even more traffic reattempting the upload.

You could just set your speed under options to 'modem'. No one should be downloading from a modem unless they have to. Clients pick amongst them according to their option settings for search speed & quality.

Limewire said "You could just set your speed under options to 'modem'. No one should be downloading from a modem unless they have to"

quite so :D:D