Utorrent freezes the wifi connexion

[Arthuro]

Hey everyone,

I have been having some problems with utorrent lately: it completely freezes my wifi connexion. I used to plug my laptop to my router via an ethernet cable and it worked fine, but since we moved the router and modem to an other room, I decided to switch to the wifi connexion.

And it cannot work properly, after a few minutes, both download and upload speed drop to zero and I get disconnected from msn, I cannot surf using either firefox or internet explorer. The connexion is gone.

MSN says that my gateway becomes unavailable when I use the help to reconnect.

I manage to get the connexion back either by shutting down utorrent or using the 'repair' function of the wifi connexion...

My 2 other flatmates also use utorrent and the wifi connexion and it seems to work fine for them. I tried to reduce the number of connexions per torrent and the number of total connexion but it has not changed anything (I have even tried to put only 10 max connexion and it still crashes)...

For the info my router is a netgear WGR614v6.

I really hope that I will get an answer I have searched the web but did not find anything that would fix that problem.

Thanks in advance

Arthuro

[Switeck]

Ah, another netgear router.

Ok, try reducing the half open connection max in µTorrent's advanced settings to 4.

Also disable UPnP, DHT, and Resolve IPs/show country flags in µTorrent.

[Arthuro]

Thanks for your swift reply. I have changed these parameters and I will let you know if there is any improvement.

thanks again

[Arthuro]

Unfortunately it does not change anything. I have even tried to reduce the half open connexion max to 1 but it still crashes....

[Switeck]

Did you also set max global connections and max connections per torrent to BELOW 60?

Also, have you tried using a very low Speed Guide setting...such as xx/56k (dial up) one?

(...just for testing! If that doesn't crash, then we can go from there.)

[Arthuro]

Hey,

I have just tried the dial up settings and it froze after a few minutes...... I'm getting really confused here. I have noticed something though:last night I left my laptop running and the freezing didn't occur according to the download/upload plot. I am just wondering then if the problem might be because my flatmates are using a software that crashes my connexion when I am running uttorrent (that would explain why it doesn't crash during the night because they turn their computers off)? It might sound stupid. I have asked them if they got any trouble using bittorrent or just browsing the web and it seems that I am the only one experiencing the freezing.

Thanks a lot for your help and your time.

Arthuro

[Switeck]

It's possible that only you get to suffer if the router's overloaded. But it's also possible they may just not notice...one of the first signs is typically slowdowns rather than complete crashes. They may reboot often, so any problems they have are (very?) temporary. Their bittorrent programs may be set really low. (...maybe they don't like to share?) Connection total is what counts though, that and how many new connections are made per second/minute...those are my best guess as to what adds up to cause the crash.

Maybe when the router overloads (from too many/too fast connections) and freaks out...the router starts "talking trash" sending malformed/broken/partial packets, only your µTorrent tries to "read" them and crashes. If it gets really mad: "I refuse to talk to you anymore...and it bluescreens your computer in a huff." Or it just "plugs its ears" and quits talking to the network.

Sadly, even µTorrent's dial-up settings has an over-optimistically high connection max...especially for a router that's possibly unable to handle 60 connections total.