Max connections per hour

[Decembermouse]

I'm on a college campus, and if we exceed any of these criteria in 1 hour, we get kicked off the network:

1. 125 mb up

2. 225 mb down

3. 1000 connections

Currently I'm using Bitcomet, but uTorrent was suggested to me as an alternative. Even if I set max connections/task as 2, disable persistent seeding, and run one torrent at a time, I will often get kicked off the network. If I get kicked 4 times in a day I lose internet "priveleges" for 24 hours. Priveleges? Please. This school is expensive, and we shouldn't have to deal with this, but we do.

So I'm wondering if you guys have any ideas for limiting my connections/hour, because it's easy to limit my bandwidth by doing the math and setting max kb/s up and down. Would this client be able to help with that? Or is there another software that can regulate that for me...?

[Switeck]

Firstly, don't run VERY active torrents with 1,000's of seeds or peers...or you'll exceed your hourly limit in minutes/seconds.

Secondly, you must put µTorrent's half open rate VERY low...maybe even only 1 from the default of 8.

You will also need to limit upload speed and probably download speed as well so as not to exceed the upload and download limits per hour. No more than 30 KiloBYTES/sec upload speed and 50 KiloBYTES/sec download speed. µTorrent's download limits are only soft-enforced, so expect occasional overruns on them.

Definitely only run 1 torrent at a time, and limit global and per-torrent connections to only 30. If you put connection max too low, your churn rate will go up rapidly on even modestly active torrents...so your "ISP" may see too many connection attempts per hour. (...that get kicked off for exceeding your max limit!)

BEYOND µTorrent, you need to carefully eliminate any other things that are making or receiving internet connections on your computer. Even if you have none, there may be internet ips still trying to contact your connection from earlier torrenting attempts. ...or from virus/trojan or spyware attacks.

[funchords]

Is that 1000 connections per hour or 1000 simultaneous connections? If a particular IP connects twice, is that one connection or two?

Decembermouse,

BitComet is an extremely bad choice for use on your campus. The reason is that BitComet does a lot of disconnecting and reconnecting (I'm guessing it does this to try to keep the number of simultaneous connections low).

You definitely want to use a client like uTorrent. I've done extensive testing with both, and I like them both, but for your situation the choice is clear.

Recommendations with uTorrent: Disable DHT -- it makes hundreds of UDP "connections" that someone might only rarely need. I don't know if your university counts UDP connections, but if they do, DHT will drive those numbers up.

> and limit global and per-torrent connections to only 30

I'm worried about this advice, because BitTorrent clients still answer the port, and then decide that adding the new client to a swarm would exceed the limit. Some clients will try again right away, and this continues forever and so forth. Each time, the client completes the TCP/IP connection, the client just never completes the BitTorrent handshake.

If you run into this, then my suggestion would be to set your Windows firewall to NOT allow incoming connections to uTorrent. uTorrent will still be able to make outgoing connections, and on many torrents, this is sufficient to get good enough speeds and complete the download. For those torrents that have just a few peers, you can temporarily allow incoming connections just for them. (Weird idea -- the university is making you do things backwards!!)

[slipstream]

Is that 1000 connections per hour or 1000 simultaneous connections?

Googling by the given numbers shows only one college campus with such rules - http://www.hope.edu/cit/tips/overflowfaq.html, and they have this rule as "1000 connections per hour".

[funchords]

Wow, you're right.

If you use uTorrent, keep your upload speeds to no more than 24 kB/s and your download speeds to no more than 48 kB/s (both numbers are about 75% of your campus limits), you should not have a problem staying within those UL/DL byte caps.

It looks like that page has a link to help you self-monitor your usage.

You might want to call CIT and ask them if UDP traffic counts as a connection. If it does, then do not use DHT. (It's basically a backup way to find peers if the tracker goes down, so you're not missing anything in most cases.)

[Switeck]

Even if UDP doesn't count as connections, you'll probably want to disable DHT, UPnP, Resolve IPs (via right-click in PEERS window), and Enable Local Peer Discover. These too can make either UDP packets or extra connections for little/no/negative change in download or upload speeds.