PIA Kill Switch instantly stops web browser connection, but torrents seem to slowly wind down. Why?

roddleberries

Issue:

When the kill switch trips, I instantly lose access to the Internet with my web browser.

However, with torrents I notice they slowly wind down even after the kill switch has been activated.  The torrents appear to go down in speed and finally stop, but this takes up to 20-30 seconds after the kill switch activated.  Why is this happening?  Shouldn't the torrents instantly stop or I'm getting brief expose and loss of privacy?

Happens no matter which torrent client I use on Mac or Windows.

MeFirst

I believe your torrent client is showing you the average speed over the last X seconds. Use another tool to measure your actual network activity or simply pull the wire/kill your router to see if the torrent behaviour is any different.

tomeworm

MeFirst said:

I believe your torrent client is showing you the average speed over the last X seconds.

That's exactly what's happening. I've used a number of different BT apps and they all do this.

Max-P

I would also add that torrent traffic is a bit different in that it uses a lot of connections, so it also takes longer for all of them to timeout/die and consequently it takes longer for the torrent client to notice you've lost all of the peers.

On the wire, the traffic is always cut to be sent serially in packets, so technically all connections are at 0b/s except the one the OS is currently processing, so averaging is necessary. Torrent clients also don't process single packets at a time because that would cause an insane amount of wakeup/sleep cycles (and expensive context switches), so there's also several stages of buffering both in the kernel and in the torrent client itself.

Torrents also uses lots of individual connections to lots of peers, and those peers connectivity also fluctuates a fair bit and also depends on how much the uploader is sharing its upload capacity with you.

So yeah, your client averages over a long period of time to avoid having the speeds jump between like 200k and 20M all the time and give you a saner and more useful total bandwidth estimate.

roddleberries

I really appreciate all the great answers.  In a nutshell, there's no leak, it's just the Clients winding themselves down without connecting to the internet.