uTorrent using excessive bandwidth? 100s of DOS attack notifications

[Yonez]

I should like to point out that I'm certainly not accusing uTorrent here, but I'm trying to explore all avenues as to why my ISP is reporting high peak-time bandwidth use.

Ok, I came back from work yesterday to find that I had apparently downloaded 770mb, despite only having uTorrent running at 1kb download and 80kb upload. I can't think of anything that would auto update with that sort of amount of data, so I checked my router's log and noticed that there were hundreds and hundreds of reported 'DOS' attacks.

So my questions are two-fold, does uTorrent use slightly greater bandwidth than it is limited to? If it does, it's definitely nothing in the region that would cause 700mb+ download in around 10 hours, is it? (I'm assuming no, but humour me please.)

I searched and found a thread about lots of reported DOS attacks (which a moderator deemed as not being a genuine DOS attack, which is fine), but could these reported DOS attacks (relating to maybe two or three different peers throughout the day, every thirty seconds or so) be causing excessive bandwidth, or is it just a quirk of the system?

As I said, I couldn't find definite answers to these so I just wanted confirmation for what I assume is the obvious answer.

[Switeck]

The bandwidth used by µTorrent could be due to high connection rates (high half open limits can cause this!) or having DHT active...or just having lots of active torrents.

[Yonez]

Ok, thanks. I contected my ISP and with a bit of diplomatic pushing they eventually told me that there are issues with downloads straddling peak/off-peak times, they did show me some stats though, and seemingly regular use is coming in at around 8mb per hour, which is totally fine.

These are all private trackers, so DHT is off, and they don't have particularly high number sof peers (I'm seeding to maybe 2 or 3 peers on each of the ten torrents, maximum about 20 peers at one time so hardly a lot, but I will have a look at that half max open connection, see if I can get things working slightly more efficiently.

Thanks again!

[Switeck]

One minor weakness of µTorrent is its reconnect rate for ips on a torrent varies depending on how many total ips are on that torrent. If there's very few, your µTorrent will be retrying ips (that didn't work) every minute or less. If there's a LOT, then ips may not get retried for the better part of an hour...or more if there's 1000's!

So an 'ideal' setting for small torrents is probably not equally ideal for huge torrents with predominately unconnectable and/or poor seeds+peers. It's even worse when trying to seed to a torrent that's got 10x as many seeds as peers (but still has 100+ peers)...lots of incoming connections get dropped because they're seeds, and some of the ips you attempt to connect to are seeds as well. Connecting and dropping that many ips sucks bandwidth and does no good, even worse to see the same seed ip tried again <5 minutes later!