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I've been using Vuze for about a year now (beta and stable). I've recently picked up that although I'm not seeding anything and I have no torrents queued, Vuze still uses about 350MB every hour for uploading and downloading. I'm unsure why it is doing this? I thought maybe it was something to do with the beta, but moving to stable does not change this.
Vuze itself shows download speed of maybe 15 B/s and 0 upload, but NetBalancer shows download of around 40kB/s and upload of 50kB/s. What could be uploading and downloading in background?
I only have a 90GB bandwidth allocation a month, so I'm sure you understand my concern with this. I also concerned that my Vuze is misreporting the bandwidth it is using. Please assist me in solving this worrisome situation!
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The way torrenting works is that it is peer to peer networking. In order to keep the list of peers updated the tracker (in the case of private trackers) or DHT and peer exchange lists (in the case of public trackers) have to get updated. To do that the torrent client and the tracker send out small packets of data every so often (the exact time determined by the tracker staff . . . it is most often in the 30 - 60 minute range) that transmit the amount of data you seeded and or downloaded since the last data packet was sent. The tracker responds to that update with a handshake and the latest list of peers. This is call the update interval and the announce packets. Now these are very very small packets of data. It has been years since I read the bitTorrent protocol document but they are in the 100 Byte to 1 kiloByte range or there abouts. You would need to be seeding an awful lot of torrents to generate 350 MB an hour. I mean even if my memory is completly wrong and the updates are actually 10 kiloBytes each to generate 350 MB an hour that would be
350 MB * 1024 kB/MB = 312,320 kB
assuming 10 kB per packet that gives us
31,232 packets
assume a 30 minute update interval so two packets sent by the torrent client every hour and two packets received from the tracker every hour per torrent
so 31,232 / 4 = 7,808 torrents
I doubt you are running that many torrents.
So where did you get the 350 MB from?
I do not know how NetBalancer works but I suspect that something is missing here. Like NetBalancer is reporting in kbit/sec not kByte/sec or that you were actually uploading on a torrent or something and did not notice or that NetBalancer is really reporting in bit/sec or Byte/sec. Or that NetBalancer does not deal with low speed data effectively and thus over-reports it or whatever.
---- Ok before posting I did a 90 second re-read of the protocol
The handshaking packets and announce packets are in the 100 Byte range or so (actually closer to about 80 Bytes I think). So my calculation was off by a factor of roughly 1000 LOL. So you would need to be seeding about 7,900,000 torrents to generate 350 MB of data an hour without uploading data to other peers.
Maybe I got that wrong but it is in that range of roughly 7,900 to 7,900,000 torrents to generate 350 MB data per hour. Now if you are calculating the 350 MB from the speeds you are seeing . . . and the speeds are actually in bits/sec rather than KBytes/sec that would lower the amount of data by a factor of 8,000 which then gets into the range of possibilities of you generating roughly 44.8 KBytes of data every hour which would only take about 1000 torrents or so.
Again I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere. It is probably that NetBalancer is getting something wrong or that it is displaying something incorrectly or that you misread the speeds or whatever. The roughly 12 Bytes/sec that Vuze is reporting is more along the lines of what makes sense according to the protocol.
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I thank you guys for the awesome responses!
I've removed all (7) torrents I had from Vuze, but alas, the bandwidth usage did not change. Almost like there was a torrent that disappeared from the gui, but was still active in the background. I decided to trash my Vuze installation and started from scratch. It seems to have solved whatever the issue was. There is still bandwidth being used, but it intermittent (vs constant previously) and very low (80kB in the last few minutes). I'll keep an eye on it and revert should I pick up anything untoward. I'm downloading the apps above out of interest anyway.
I appreciate the time spent on this by you.
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Maybe you have started typing something on Vuze which turned out to be filled in the "filter" field, filtering the torrents on your list, from time to time I ended up doing it here.
