So yesterday I'm playing a game of League of Legends on my PC. I notice my ping time is up in the 300-400 range where it's usually in the 40-60 range. I didn't think much of this until my game stared, then I could tell it felt very laggy, I would click to move and my guy would stand there for a couple of seconds then move, something was wrong.
Luckily I have a pretty high end SonicWall firewall at my house. It has Application Flow monitoring built-in so I can see what's using my bandwidth. I went into the interface and it seemed that a service called IDM was using up all of my bandwidth (I have a 10Mbps down connection with Time Warner). At first I didn't know what IDM was, but the SonicWall linked me to this. So in essence, it's a download accelerator type application like FlashGet. When you download something, multiple threads are opened to the remote server, each requesting sections of the file. This speeds up downloads, but it's like having multiple file downloads going at once, so it can easily eat up every drop of bandwidth you have available if the remote servers can send faster than you can receive.
So I changed the view to look at what device was initiating the IDM traffic, assuming one of my PC's had uTorrent or some other threaded download going. Nope, it was the Hopper! It must have been downloading a few of the movies I had rented (for free) via OnDemand a few minutes earlier, but I couldn't tell for sure (no "downloads" view within the Hopper). So the Hopper has a built in IDM client it uses for these downloads. This is pretty cool from an IT geek perspective, but for the average Joe, wondering why their Internet is slow (especially noticeable for gaming), this could be a pain in the rear.
I just went to bed after figuring this out, but I wanted to share with the team. As of right now I don't see a way within the Hopper to throttle download speeds or IDM threads, so out of the box it has the ability to bring your Internet to a crawl, just FYI. I think I can limit this via my SonicWall Firewall, but that's not something an average user wants to mess with.
Just FYI in your travels if you start to see slow Internet after you moved over to the Hopper. It may be OnDemand!
Luckily I have a pretty high end SonicWall firewall at my house. It has Application Flow monitoring built-in so I can see what's using my bandwidth. I went into the interface and it seemed that a service called IDM was using up all of my bandwidth (I have a 10Mbps down connection with Time Warner). At first I didn't know what IDM was, but the SonicWall linked me to this. So in essence, it's a download accelerator type application like FlashGet. When you download something, multiple threads are opened to the remote server, each requesting sections of the file. This speeds up downloads, but it's like having multiple file downloads going at once, so it can easily eat up every drop of bandwidth you have available if the remote servers can send faster than you can receive.
So I changed the view to look at what device was initiating the IDM traffic, assuming one of my PC's had uTorrent or some other threaded download going. Nope, it was the Hopper! It must have been downloading a few of the movies I had rented (for free) via OnDemand a few minutes earlier, but I couldn't tell for sure (no "downloads" view within the Hopper). So the Hopper has a built in IDM client it uses for these downloads. This is pretty cool from an IT geek perspective, but for the average Joe, wondering why their Internet is slow (especially noticeable for gaming), this could be a pain in the rear.
I just went to bed after figuring this out, but I wanted to share with the team. As of right now I don't see a way within the Hopper to throttle download speeds or IDM threads, so out of the box it has the ability to bring your Internet to a crawl, just FYI. I think I can limit this via my SonicWall Firewall, but that's not something an average user wants to mess with.
Just FYI in your travels if you start to see slow Internet after you moved over to the Hopper. It may be OnDemand!
