too many connections

[lav-chan]

I'm having a dilemma here. I was just informed by my network administrator that i'm pretty much single-handedly bringing down the wireless network i'm on because i have 8000 connections going (and netstat seems to confirm that, although i'm not going to sit there and count them all out). uTorrent appears to be the cause of this, because when i exit the program those connections all get closed.

My problem is, i can't figure out why in the world i would ever have that many connections going. 'Maximum global connections' on my uTorrent is set to 200, and 'Maximum number of connected peers per torrent' is set to 70. I have like one or two downloads and two or three uploads going at a time, which i suppose is probably more than absolutely necessary, but that still doesn't explain 8000 connections.

I do have DHT and peer exchange enabled on all of these torrents, so i was thinking maybe one of those is the culprit. I know what DHT does (basically, anyway), but i'm not 100% sure what peer exchange is for, and i don't want to go around fooling with stuff i don't understand, so i'm asking here. Is one of those probably the issue? Do DHT or peer exchange somehow override the global connections maximum? If so... why?

Or is it something else entirely? I don't know, any advice would be great. TIA

[DreadWingKnight]

If something is claiming DHT packets as connections, it's mis-claiming.

What happens when you watch TCPview (sysinternals)?

[lav-chan]

Umm. It shows about a hundred (maybe fewer) 'ESTABLISHED' connections going through uTorrent, most of which are relatively stable. (Only a few are changing status from moment to moment.) Definitely not 8000, or even 200, although my administrator said something about throttling the number of connections i could have, so maybe that's related.

[Switeck]

If you can get by with it, disable DHT and unforward UDP at your router.

That should shut up your clueless wireless admin that is probably using antiquated multiplexing equipment.

BTW, if you have 5 max torrents active at once and 4 upload slots each, then you'll need AT LEAST 20 KB/sec upload speed to satisfy them all. Otherwise, you're sending out less than 1 KB/sec per person (per upload slot)...and that won't really encourage them to upload back to you. Just by decreasing upload slots slightly if you've exceeded that value can increase your overall download speeds.