I've got bittorrent-3.3 (btdownloadcurses) running from a shell as a normal user on a 300/128k ADSL. My net interfaces are lo, ppp0 (rp-pppoe-3.5), eth0 (3Com 3c59x connected to my PPPoE Alcatel Speed Touch Home) and eth1 (Realtek 8139c to my other computer - quite inactive). I'm using linux-2.4.22-vanilla. If I download a torrent at about 10kB/s download and 15kB/s upload (so that my upload band is saturated), not only I get a _serious_ decay in all other internet activities (i.e. web browsing, which take a risible upload band), but even "host localhost", which should not go to through ppp0, takes 3-4 seconds to answer (!). As soon as I close btdownloadcurses (simply pressing "q"), all returns normal and "host localhost" answers istantaneously.
uhh thats the way adsl works ... if you're using 100% of your upload, you're going to get about 1% of your download ... you said yourself that you're uploading at like ~15kB/s which is pretty much 100% of your upload (the rest is for overhead)
actually, the "host localhost" just try to resolve using your configured DNS server. try ping 127.0.0.1 instead. I believe it's a upload bandwidth problem like mike said.
If I completely saturate my upload bandwitdth with mlDonkey *and* DC++ (on wine), I can still download at full speed (at least 30kB/s). Also, I've noticed that this problem with bittorrent also happens when I'm uploading just 9kB/s. The problem reported by Spanky happened very often with Win98 (mostly with KaZaA), but I've never experienced it before on Linux or Win2k. DC++ has a option called "use small send buffer" that prevents this phenomenon. I've already tried bittorrent-theshadow-5.8.7, but the problem remains. When resolving a host, the /etc/hosts file is first checked, and only if a match is not found the DNS is called. Since "localhost" is in /etc/hosts, it should not use ppp0 at all. "ping 127.0.0.1" is istantaneous.
just because bittorrent can completely drop your download to 0 while utilizing upload at 100% doesnt mean it's a bug ... thats simply how adsl works ... and because you think you've completely saturated your download with other p2p programs while download still seems 'to be fast' doesnt mean your upload is 100% saturated if you think it's a bug, then go file something with the kernel hackers asking them to fix their tcp/ip stacks
