Disk overload 100%, and connection killed

[Thanatus]

I started uTorrent and everything appeared normal. I did notice I was getting a peculiarly fast download rate on one torrent when the status bar at the very bottom read "Disk overload: 100%"

Then all my connectivity died, all downloads went to a crawl. I tried exiting uTorrent but it seemed frozen. I tried ending process in task manager, but it wouldn't shutdown until I put my cable modem on standby.

This seems very fishy to me, a buffer overflow caused by a tampered packet recieved by uTorrent? I don't know the specifics of packet shaping or whether it's a possibility with data sent through torrent.

Then again it could be a simple error, but I wish to be sure.

[ajones81]

What sort of download speeds do you get normally?

Seems to me you're facing a similar problem as discussed here and there's no definitive solution as of now. Try the settings mentioned in that post though - they might very well help you somewhat.

[Thanatus]

I usually get around 500 to 700 kb/s on a well seeded torrent, anywhere from 100 to

300 kb/s with lots of leechers. Speed tests tell me I have a max download speed of 6.7 MB/s and an upload of about 480 kb/s. It may be worth mentioning I do have a Motorola SurfBoard cable modem and my ISP is Earthlink. My IP is not static. Does Earthlink configure ports through my modem? The thread I viewed suggesting this wasn't completely clear on how to find that out.

I haven't had the problem repeat itself since the incident I spoke of. Hopefully these other threads are correct in assuming it's a system problem.

[Switeck]

Are you sure you have a max download speed of 6.7 MEGABYTES/sec? More than likely it's only 6.7 megabits/sec...which tops out around 800 KiloBYTES/sec max download speed for files.

[Thanatus]

Ha, my mistake.

Correction: 858.1 KB/s D 61.5 KB/s U according to a speed test.

[Switeck]

Your hard drive/s may have reverted to PIO mode due to Windows crashing.

There may be something constantly accessing the hard drive/s, slowing them down to the point that µTorrent's relatively slow random reads/writes push it over the edge of sustainability.

A drive accessed through USB almost certainly can expect to have this problem with µTorrent. USB sucks for random reads/writes due to its serial (1-bit-at-a-time) access nature.

[slipstream]

A drive accessed through USB almost certainly can expect to have this problem with µTorrent. USB sucks for random reads/writes due to its serial (1-bit-at-a-time) access nature.

Correction - cannot expect with such low download/upload speeds. At least cannot reproduce that on my USB2.0 harddrive - http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=267856#p267856

[Switeck]

Yours is definitely the exception rather than the rule. 500 KiloBYTES/sec download plus an equal amount of upload to a USB drive...is definitely beyond what USB v1.1 can do.

...and may be a problem for older USB v2.0 drives *IF* the USB connections on your computer are also used by other things (they're shared-bandwidth connections, like a HUB) and also if the hard drive is being accessed by other programs as well at the same time.

Older USB drivers are often the fault rather than the hard drives themselves, thanks to many hard drives now having 8 to 64 MB of fast cache ram and 5400 RPM being the lowest end rotational speed for drives now instead of the high-end. (2.5" drives are often lower RPM.)

[Thanatus]

It's possible one of my AVG or Windows Defender autoscans may have caused disk overload. Fortunately, this problem has not repeated, so it seems it isn't something constantly accessing the HD in the background, I'll just have to be more wary of anything starting up while uTorrent is running.