Torrents Resulting in WAN Packet Loss

planedrop

Wanted to post this here to get some thoughts or experiences from others. Or, if I'm way off and it is pfSense, I'd be curious to hear about that.

I recently swapped back to my Netgate 6100 due to issues I was having with my Unifi Dream Machine Pro Max (and just general meh-ness of it).

One of the issues I was hoping I would resolve with this was horrible packet loss that happened every time I would start up my seed box (hosting legit Linux ISOs). I presumed the issue was the number of connections overwhelming the Unifi gear, but turns out that wasn't it.

My torrents are all public, not behind a VPN, since again they're literally Linux ISOs, and anytime I turn them on within a few minutes I start to get bad packet loss (sometimes as high as 30%), I'm starting to think my ISP is doing this intentionally, since I'm nowhere near the limits of what the 6100 is capable of, and my WAN speed is 8/8 gigabit (not that the 6100 can hit quite that but 3/3 is common) and the torrents will be consuming sub 100Mbps traffic.

Anyone heard of an ISP not just throttling torrent traffic, but nuking an entire network due to torrents being detected?

Either way, going to spin a VPN to try this out, but it's odd behavior to say the least. Only other thought is maybe the ISP can't handle this number of connections, but that would also be odd in my experience.

Notably, this didn't create an issue until about a week ago, for a while it was fine, but my peer count has gone way way up during the last 2 weeks.

Gertjan

@planedrop said in Torrents Resulting in WAN Packet Loss:

Anyone heard of an ISP not just throttling torrent traffic, but nuking an entire network due to torrents being detected?

Officially ? Never

Have ISP being suspected of filtering and limiting ? All the time.
Of course they do.
Because we all would do the same thing when we detect that the little brother was gobbing the entire home network as he was coping the entire pirate bay content on his laptop.
So, most of us just pulled his plug, or put him behind a limiter.

The ISP is/does the same thing, just one set higher.
I'm not saying it's ok or even justified, but maybe torrent traffic makes them nervous.

stephenw10

Check the pps rate. That can be very high on torrents and might be hitting a limit.

But where are you seeing the packet loss? Just on the gateway monitoring? Are you monitoring something external?

planedrop

@stephenw10 I'll do some checking on this, though I somewhat doubt that is the issue considering how little traffic I was actually seeing.

As for the packet loss, not just gateway monitoring, but also traffic dropping when trying to load websites and pings from clients being dropped entirely as well.

Pings to external services, to be clear.

Also becomes really obvious with things like voice chat services, lots of disconnected/cutouts/roboting.

I'm heavily leaning towards it being the ISP but it's odd that they aren't just throttling and instead I'm just seeing overall packet loss. I can run a speed test during it and still get pretty good bandwidth.

planedrop

@Gertjan said in Torrents Resulting in WAN Packet Loss:

@planedrop said in Torrents Resulting in WAN Packet Loss:

Anyone heard of an ISP not just throttling torrent traffic, but nuking an entire network due to torrents being detected?

Officially ? Never

Have ISP being suspected of filtering and limiting ? All the time.
Of course they do.
Because we all would do the same thing when we detect that the little brother was gobbing the entire home network as he was coping the entire pirate bay content on his laptop.
So, most of us just pulled his plug, or put him behind a limiter.

The ISP is/does the same thing, just one set higher.
I'm not saying it's ok or even justified, but maybe torrent traffic makes them nervous.

Pulled the monitoring data for PPS, figured it would be easiest to just show it, the first is my PPS graph and the second is my packet loss and latency graphs for the same time period, so they do line up (not that that's surprising).

Maybe this many pps was overwhelming the ISP?