This small footprint malarky...

[stevvi]

Hi,

Firs off, I love uTorrent for it's simplicity and it just seems to work. One thing that others don't seem to have a problem with, but I do, is slowdown of system. If I try to open, for example, Firefox/Thunderbrd with uTorrent running I get a load of disk thrashing for 5 - 10 secs (often longer) b4 the progs finally become usable. Playing games with uTorrent running is just a no-no, unless every so often I want to miss a few corners in NFS while my h/disk sorts itself out.

My question is, is there some setting that I can... ermm... set to improve system performance while having uTorrent do its stuff?

Thanx.

[Animorc]

Have you changed anything in the Advanced Options section? If you have, remove settings.dat and restart µTorrent. If not, change diskio.write_queue_size to somewhere around 4 times the maximum download speed you get.

Also if you downloaded the beta release, try the 1.2 stable release instead. And if you are already running 1.2, try downloading the beta to see if it works better.

[stevvi]

The only thing I have changed in 1.2.1 Beta is net.low.cpu. I have a 2Mb d/load (not often used at that rate!) so should I have a value of 8000 odd for the diskio.write_queue_size setting?

Cheers.

[Animorc]

That sounds like a reasonable value. Do you notice any difference speedwise and systemwise with net.low_cpu set to true?

[stevvi]

I'll try it with net.low_cpu set to true and see what happens when family life allows me to indulge in simple pleasures. Thanx for your help.

[Firon]

Try setting the cache to 16000, and set net.low_cpu to true, see if it helps.

Also, get 1.2.1

[ColdArmor]

1.2.1 fixes all those nasty bugs. =] Hence - bug fixing release.

[stevvi]

As previously mentioned, I am running 1.2.1. Anyway, it apears that setting net.low_cpu to true had done the trick, although I'm yet to play any games. Thanx.

[stevvi]

As a follow up, I'm now using 1.2.2 but am still having the same old problems. With uTorrent running with 3 d/loads, getting Thunderbird from minimised to maximised can take upward of 10 secs with all that diskthrashing. Without uTorrent running it takes under a sec. Any more advice would be greatly appreciated.

[chaosblade]

What are your current write cache options set to ?

[stevvi]

As recommended, I've tried setting diskio.write_queue_size to 8000 and am now using 16000 but it doesn't seem to make much difference. All other advanced options are at default.

[Firon]

Is your internet two Megabits or two Megabytes?

Also, have you made sure that your HD is set to DMA access and not PIO? Windows can fall back to PIO (we saw it happen to someone here). You can check your IDE controller to see that in the Device Manager.

Is your HD slow/ancient?

[stevvi]

Firon,

Thanx for your patience. My connection is 2272 kbps down, 288 kbps up. My h/disk is a 200Gb SATA Maxtor running in Ultra DMA 2 - Ultra 33 mode... which should be able to handle things comfortably I've gone back to the default setting abd things are just as bad. I really don't know what to do.

[Firon]

Ultra DMA 2? That's NOT normal...

It should be Ultra DMA 6 - Ultra133. Or possibly higher, I'm not sure for SATA.

Try raising that setting, you might have to do it manually. It's not normal for that to happen though, it's possible Windows set it back because of CRC failures...

[stevvi]

Firon,

Apologies. I was looking at my DVD drive... that's what happens when I post early on a sunday morning after a saturday night. As fa as I can see, there is no UDMA setting for my h/disk. I am running a bios that's a only a few months old and the latest nforce drivers.

Have just installed the latest SATA driver that informs me I'm running at UDMA 6.

[stevvi]

As a final follow up to this one, I have changed my router and USB adapter and now the h/disk does not thrash. It seems that my old Netgear WG111T USB adapter was the culprit.

[dcorban]

1) You have not said how much RAM you have.

2) Firefox is always slow to load

[chaosblade]

How the hell is firefox related >.>

[Animorc]

The issue was that Firefox and Thunderbird (for example) loads slowly.

[Amuro]

firefox likes to hog memory when any other programs are running! Plus, that thrashing is firefox reloading all the cached files from other sites uve been too etc. Suggest clering the cache in the options menu under privacy in firefox.

[stevvi]

I have 1Gb RAM. The issue was disk thrashing with uTorrent running. I only used Firefox & Thunderbird as examples. Without uTorrent running those progs opened fine with minimal disk access. Anyway, as said, it looks like the issue was with my dodgy USB adapter.