Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: ISP's meddling with bitcoin protocol?
by
tl121
on 24/05/2014, 01:09:06 UTC
Bitcoin core may suck all available bandwidth if you run it over a router connected to an ISP over DSL, which typically has a decent download speed but a pathetic upload speed.  Things may run fine for several days, but sooner or later one or more newbies will start downloading the 20 GB blockchain through your computer. At this point if you have a typical home router that allocates available bandwidth in a dumb way your Internet connection will be hosed. 

A simple solution is to limit the upload bandwidth that bitcoin core can get.  Since bitcoin-core does not provide any control for this (unlike most bittorrent clients) you will have to use some other method of limiting its access. I found that my router (leased from my ISP) provided some quality of service feature that would allow me to limit the bandwidth of each of my computers by putting their uploads into separate queues, but this didn't help the problem for me because I was running bitcoin core and other software on the same machine (a Windows 7 system).

I fixed my problem by using the Windows Group Policy Manager and adding a rule to limit the upload bandwidth used by bitcoind.exe.  This got the job done.  I set it to about 50% of my available upload bandwidth, which is more than enough to keep up with new transactions and new blocks, while still allowing people to download old blocks, albeit at a slow rate.  Now web browsing is unaffected by running the bitcoin node on the same computer. I also have another computer that controls some miners.  This machine was getting a lot of stales until I solved my congestion problem.