Alright, this is pissing me off [tech help needed!]

[WindRavenX]

Alright, so I get my ass to Boston College (WOO!!! GO EAGLES!), finally fucking figure out how to connect to the ethernet and am psyched to start downloading stuff via WinMx.
The problem? My DL rates are about .3 kb/s- nowhere NEAR what they should be (100 KB/S-1MB a sec is normal!!). I don't know why this is- I thought perhaps firewall, but I believe they are disabled- so this really is getting under my skin. Uploads are also extremely slow as well.
I get the net fine- things are fast- and other downloads outside of WinMx are fast. I tried Kazaa lite (no spyware), and the same problem occurs.
So what's up here? Am I a moron for not configuring something right w/WinMX or Kazaa lite? :shrug:
Any help would be much appreciated! :hi:

[Not a robought]

1. It may be you are sharing a network connection

with a bunch of other students who are trying to do the same thing, thus bottlenecking your connection. Or it could be a hub which acts as a splitter and shares your bandwidth among many connections.

[WindRavenX]

2. I was told there really was no bandwith limit

I thought about the masses of students using the network, though. That's probably it...
Dammit, I want my Justin Timberlake songs x(

[uberotto]

3. Maybe not a bandwidth limit for Port 80...

which is the port that you use to connect to web servers via TCP/IP, but the school might be limiting the bandwidth for the port which kazaa connects through in an effort to control p2p file sharing.

I'm not real sure how kazaa or winmx works, but you might try changing the port number that the program uses to share files.

[Rabrrrrrr]

4. And Boston College

(and congrats on getting in - I remember your essay from last Spring or last Fall!) - but they may very well be choking down kazaa and other peer-to-peer file sharing stuff. Some colleges have done so both for legal reasons (thinking they might get sued) but mostly for bandwidth problems, beacsue a whole dorm on one line in which everyone is running kazaa and sharing 50GB each of stuff slows it all right down.

Especially since you say other internet stuff runs just fine, I'd suspect the college is choking you on the file sharing.

[Eat_The_Rich]

5. Its not your bandwitdth

Chances are you are only downloading from on person's computer, and they may have a slow connection. Make sure you can view the download connection speed. WinMX and Kazaa each have these figures available. I have seen speeds as slow as .4kb and as fast as 75.00kb. The trick is to download from more than one source at the same time. If you right click on a current download, you have the option of finding more sources. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. It depends on how many people with that particular file in their shared directory, are on the system at the time.

[ChoralScholar]

6. Why don't you try this...

Go to www.dslreports.com, and do a speed test under "Our Tools" If you're getting decent throughput (at a university, probably around 1000 kb/s down and 500 kb/s up (thats kiloBITS by the way, not kiloBYTES)) then it is your university choking the port that p2p software uses. If you need some help interpreting your test results catch me on my personal email.

W. Thomas Rickman, CNE

EDIT: forgot not to use brackets :)

[DisgustipatedinCA]

7. I'll betcha it's a Packet Shaper

There's a company called Packeteer that makes a product called the Packet Shaper. I configure/install/maintain these boxes as a part of my job. The Packeteer analyzes and shapes traffic, including KaZaa and the like. Packeteer has had its biggest growth in the education vertical market the last couple of years--it's very popular with colleges.

The typical setup would include statements that allow mission-critical traffic to get the bandwidth it needs, with everything else getting the leftovers. BUT, you can also configure it to limit KaZaa to 1k download, 1k upload, or some other similarly ridiculous number.

And if this box (or similar) is installed on your campus network, there's not a lot you can do about it. If you happen to have physical access to the room where it sits, you could just unplug it, since it acts like a passthrough when off. :)