Huge speed fluctuations when downloading files on Torrent. What can I do to fix this?

Question

Anyone can possibly explain me why am I getting these huge fluctuations?

Solution

This is a frequently asked question. Unfortunately it rarely gets a correct answer.

While there are many different causes to fluctuations in the download speed, in this case with many peaks over 30 MB/s, the most likely reason is that the download speed exceeds what can be written out to disk.

Sequential writes to disk can be done in much higher speeds than that, but bittorrent downloading is done "rarest first" which has a close to random write pattern. Such writes can be more than hundred times slower than sequential writes.

A larger cache won't help. If the download speed is higher than the write speed, the cache will sooner or later be full, regardless of how large it is.

When that happens, the download will pause until the writes has caught up.

So what can be done to fix this?!
Limit the download speed to lower than the max continuous write speed.
This can be done by limiting the download speed very low and then rise it in small steps until the max write speed is found.

Comments

[Eric F]

That is the way a torrent usually works.

[Ramhound]

There is nothing wrong with your speeds. The graph is based on total upload or download, so any period of time where you are not downloading/uploading, would decrease the numbers for that time period.

[Overmind]

On a short interval with constant traffic it's most certainly due to disk overload.

[Overmind]

The problem are the fragments, not the actual speed. Torrents drop too many file fragments, it's not just a disk write. That's why a download that does not exceed 10MB/s can saturate a disk that certainly can write at above 60MB/s, or even over 200MB/s for new drives.