# How to correctly tweak mldonkey?

## tkhobbes

Hi all

I am using a gentoo server box and some clients; on the server, mldonkey v2.7.0 is running.

For some reason, when it is running, it is blocking my whole line - surfing, mailing, whatever, does not work any more or just veeeeery slow and limited (time outs etc.)

Now, how do I tweak mldonkey to behave? I start it via init-script and it shall just run in the background...

BTW: I have ADSL, speed is 1200/200, iirc.... and I am using an ADSL router, which is between the internet and all my boxes.

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## tuxmin

There are options to lower the max upload and download rates and max incoming and outgoing connections. Lower these and you should be fine.

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## tkhobbes

thanks - I found my mistake. I tweaked the wrong entries, and tweaking via external gui (mldonkeywatch) did not work.

I now edited the /etc/conf.d/mldonkey file - everything is fine now...

One just has to know where to look....  :Smile: 

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## tkhobbes

Seems like I thought too early of being all fine - I now have the following settings in /etc/conf.d/mldonkey:

```

# bandwidth control, values in kb/s

LOW_DOWN="5"

LOW_UP="1"

HIGH_DOWN="15"

HIGH_UP="3"

```

But still, when mldonkey is running, everything is very slow - and often I have timeouts...

What am I doing wrong?

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## Strowi

hi,

the settings in /etc/conf.d/mldonkey are, as far as i know, to be controlled through

```

* Usage: mldonkey { start|stop|restart|pause|zap|start|stop|restart|slow|fast|info }

*        mldonkey without arguments for full help

```

as a gui you should have a look at sancho ("emerge sancho-bin"), and configure mldonkey.

And maybe you should check your network, if you have iptables/router whatever running.

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## tkhobbes

Hi there

No iptables or similar are running; I already use sancho, but I still do not know which parameters I have to tweak in order to still be able to get fairly good download rates, but have also fairly useable response times for surfing and e-mail...

thomas

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## Strowi

hi,

that is a little different....

mldonkey uses your connection as good as it can. You can try to change the "max. allowed connections" or max up/download, but that is just a trial & error method.

What you probably want is traffic shaping, little harder to setup, but works here perfect (3 Clients + no slow-downs surfing the web). 

With Traffic-shaping you can give ports(http/mail/mldonkey) different priorites.

There are some howtos in the documentation forum about traffic-shaping.

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## fikiz

I've the same problem. When mldonkey is running firefox get really hard to download web pages.

As soon as I stop mldonkey everything returns to normality.

The strange thing is that this happens only in last two weeks... And I didn't change the mldonkey configuration. and mldonkey isn't using all the bandwidth, because network traffic is near zero.

I tried reducing some parameters like max. allowed connections and I/O bandwidth limit, with no success.

any ideas?

thanks

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## tkhobbes

Hello

My current /etc/conf.d/mldonkey looks like this (or at least, relevant parts):

```

# bandwidth control, values in kb/s

LOW_DOWN="5"

LOW_UP="1"

HIGH_DOWN="15"

HIGH_UP="3"

```

Relevant parts of downloads.ini:

```

 max_hard_upload_rate = 2

 max_hard_download_rate = 50

 max_opened_connections = 100

 max_indirect_connections = 20

 max_upload_slots = 3

 friends_upload_slot = false

 dynamic_slots = false

 max_connections_per_second = 10

```

With these settings, my problems have disappeared - for the most part...

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## fikiz

I'm using more restrictive parameters... but this doesn't help   :Sad: 

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## spiralvoice

To improve MLDonkey performance activate USE flag "threads".

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