WinMX speed limit ?

[JarJarTheCGiTroll]

No matter what I do, even when there are multiple connections to people with fast speeds, my *total* WinMX speed never seems to go above 3Mbps (download or upload).

I don't have any speed limits set in the WinMX settings, my Internet connection is far beyond that, and I do achieve the latter's maximum speeds with other file transfer programs (such as torrents et al).

I'd like to know if there's a speed limit somehow hard-coded or by design limitation in WinMX ?

I do realize the program was written over a decade ago, back when available Internet speeds were much slower than today. I wonder if other peeps achieve faster speeds than the above in their day-to-day WinMX usage ?

Thank you if you can enlighten me... 

[silicon_toad2000]

There's no speed limit hard coded into winmx. There may be more efficient ways to reassemble the file than how winmx was originally programmed.

Are you seeing this limit when only downloading one file with multiple connections or on multiple files with multiple connections?

As far as the total spped, im in australia <sarcasm> with our super fast connections </sarcasm> so I have often had winmx maxing out my connection. Someone else can probably advise what kind of max total speed they are getting.

[wonderer]

there are two things you should keep in mind,
all download and upload need a portion of your bandwidth to negotiate the download or upload
the bigger the blocks that are send/received the less negotiate overhead but more change on a failing block transmit/receive

your own speed always is depending on the speed of the party on the other end of the transfer
pushing out files can overload a slower system resulting in many retransmits slowing down the effective speed of the transfer 

[JarJarTheCGiTroll]

Are you seeing this limit when only downloading one file with multiple connections or on multiple files with multiple connections?

All cases.

Example: I have user1 who sends to me at around 300KB, and user2 who sends at around the same speed, but only when only one of them is connected. Now I connect to them both simultaneously - all of a sudden, each one drop their speeds for a combined total of around 300KB. I disconnect one of them, the remaining one automatically climbs back up to 300KB.

Hence, throttling. But where ? What ISP would bother with shaping WinMX at this point, while ignoring torrents and everything else ? Doesn't make sense.

Ergo, my speculation about it being a WinMX limitation of some sort.

It WOULD be extremely interesting to get an idea of what people out there can do in terms of WinMX maximum speeds, especially those on high-speed connections. Any idea of how to get a statistic, other than posting a poll or something like that ?

@wonderer: it's a modern system and connection with modern speeds (meaning, forget about overhead and maximum connections inside reasonable limits i.e. just a few dozens), and torrents don't present the same limitation even when running hundreds of transfers.

[silicon_toad2000]

well my connection is about 1.1MB/s or 11 Mb/s and ive maxed that out with just winmx.

plenty of ISP's used to throttle winmx as packet inspection finds those packets pretty easily, it's just a rule in their firewalls which they set and forget so there's no reason they wouldn't and very little reason they would.

I'm assuming you don't have a bandwidth throttle set in the winmx settings, could you confirm that's not the case so we can rule that out.

[Pri]

Which ISP is this? I was renting a server from OVH in france which has the exact same limit. 300KB/s per connection. I could for example open 12 separate connections between two servers and each single connection would hit a 300KB/s cap and go no faster.

To get around the problem I switched to a different company. By the way if anyone was wondering, high end routers such as those offered by Cisco, Sophos UTM, PFSense etc all have built in profiles for detecting WinMX and it's a simple 1 click checkbox to detect and manage it. So companies that purchase equipment from vendors can simply go to the P2P management menu and tick boxes for WinMX, eDonkey, DC++ etc - It's not hard for them.

[White Stripes]

...all have built in profiles for detecting WinMX and it's a simple 1 click checkbox...

over 10 years after the newest winmx version this equipment still has bandwidth management for it?

[Pri]

Yep. Here is a screenshot showing the built in traffic shaper from PFSense in the latest version of the firewall. This isn't provided by a plugin or package, it's built right in.



As you can see it not only lists WinMX at the bottom it also has Napster! - Sophos UTM also has WinMX listed but I'm not running it right now and Cisco's management stuff also has it in their P2P shape menu which I'm also not running right now. PFSense 4 lyfe.

[Pri]

By the way if that image is a bit hard to see (Forum scales it) here is a direct link: http://i.imgur.com/wgI3ZR5.png

[White Stripes]

strange collection... a list of some that are long since gone and yet missing some notables that have been around for years.. i smell code rot...

[Pri]

Probably. Though these are loaded in as profiles and not hard-coded in to the software so it's more a case of leaving profiles in a folder.

[GhostShip]

The signatures that are detected fall into two camps, the main method is simply to detect the plaintext GET command for files transfer that many p2p systems utilise and a more WinMX specific method was to monitor for the cache to client exchange packet that can be used to set the throttling mechanism on due to its fixed format, I am not aware of any other time they are able to throttle/block as due to the encryption they are unable to read the packet data.

[White Stripes]

I am not aware of any other time they are able to throttle/block as due to the encryption they are unable to read the packet data.

if i were the the programmer of that traffic manager i wouldnt care.. the port numbers would be flagged as 'using winmx' and everything would be throttled.. encrypted or not...

[GhostShip]

That is the specific reason ports are not fixed in the WinMX client, however the cache ports are less flexible, an annoying weakness.

[Pri]

I've looked at the source code of the XML file that specifies how PFSense detects WinMX and it does appear to use just a very basic port based approach:

Code: [Select]

$p2plist['winmx'] = array();
$p2plist['winmx'][] = array('WinMX', 'tcp', '6699', '6699', 'both');
I didn't use those port numbers when I was being throttled. As I was trying to diagnose the issue I changed them. Of course I don't know what firewall stuff they use. Here is one interesting tidbit, I had two servers within the same data centre. They could only communicate with each other using their WAN addresses as they weren't in the same rack. Connections between them over WinMX were not throttled and I could easily hit 100Mb/s between them. But if the connections went out over the internet, locked to 300KB/s per individual transfer.

I've read previously some data centres shape any encrypted traffic that isn't recognised. There are ways to fingerprint certain types of traffic even encrypted so you can't tell what it is being transferred due to the encryption but you can surmise what protocol it is based on latencies, hops, packet headers, port numbers, TTL's and so on.

[JarJarTheCGiTroll]

Thanks for the replies everyone, some interesting info there.

I wish I had a 300KB/s cap per transfer - in my case it's 300KB/s *total* (all transfers combined).

I did some experimenting around with ports and other things and could get higher speeds for downloads (although not by much, and again far below my capabilities and with lots of people connected simultaneously), but not for uploads (also far below my connection).

Seems there's a real possibility I'm stuck with some packet shaper somewhere limiting WinMX severely while being far more permissive with bittorrent (morons > ). Maybe an old setting left from older days when WinMX was more active, by some lazy sysadmin.

I say that this whole protocol shaping thing is racist. That's right, racist. It's like, "welcome Mr. HTTP, always glad to see you Sir, your luxury suite is ready" vs "I'm sorry Mr. WinMX, we don't serve your kind on this establishment, please use the back door etc". RACISSSSSMM !!!!

[Bluey_412]

Something not mentioned, and often forgotten is that by design, WinMX is kinda slow because it was designed to use no more than 10% of available bandwidth.

WinMX is not a 'Skit and Watch it' program, like torrents etc, it was designed so that the user could do other work on his computer with WinMX running in the background, even on corporate networks, but it would get you your files, whereas a Torrent would catch the attention of the SysAdmin, and get blocked

[White Stripes]

10K/s down 7K/s up for overhead... not much but winmx uses a modified http to get files... it may be from the old days but http is as fast as whatever connection it has....

...download a linux iso (or other large test file) with ncsa mosaic sometime...