Sudden and DRAMATIC decrease in d/l and u/l performance

[greshgore]

Hello everyone, I appreciated all the help you folks gave me with my last issue, and I'm hoping you can help me now as well.

Depending on time of day, number of sources, types of files etc, I can usually d/l from shareaza anywhere from 60 to 100KB/s, certainly not the fastest in the world, but better than my old dialup connection by far.

A few days ago, I saw a sudden and dramatic decrease in both my d/l and u/l performance. Now, I rarely get over 20 kB/s down for any length of time, and I've even spent hours downloading at 3 kB's or less...yes...you read that right....slower than a 56k modem. My u/l speed seems to be struggling as well, but it at least, is hovering near my maximum (according to shareaza)of around 32. Just now, (several minutes ago) I logged into shareaza and downloaded a test file with tons of sources, the download immediately shot up to the speeds I'm used to, so I canceled the download, thinking everything was fixed, but now I'm back to very slow speeds again. This problem extends to bittorrent as well.

Normal internet use, visiting web pages, and downloading files from websites, runs as smooth as it always has, it is only my P2P programs that are suffering. I did a clean reinstall of shareaza, running with everything at default, with no change in my slow performance.

Does this sudden change in performance indicate that my ISP has begun throttling P2P connections? I was under the impression that companies tended to only throttle the upload portion of P2P. I tried the Glasnost throttling test, which the makers themselves admit is not 100% accurate, and everything shows green. In fact, my simulated bittorrent connection ran 100 kb/s FASTER in their test, than my d/l have ever ran.

I appreciate any help you folks can provide.

Incidentally: I am running XP Pro SP3 with the connection limit patch installed, and I have made no system changes in the past several days of any kind, so I doubt it would be something in my OS causing the problem.

[old_death]

OK... First step to analyze the problem: Do you pass the connection test.

Second step: http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php
(This is to test if BT traffic passes as it should.)