What are some ways to help utorrent run on a 'weak' router?

[HopefulDeath]

Well, ole faithful has served me well for the past year. Used to be I could set the max connections to 250, run 5 torrents at a time, the works.

Unfortunately lately she isn't what she used to be. After about 10 minutes of that strain my router crashes nowadays. I was wondering what a good way to stop this from happening is. I lowered total connections to 100 and use one torrent at a time, and it prolongs the life of the router, but it still inevitably crashes and I need to reset it.

I... haven't tried disabling DHT. But personally I like DHT and I deal with a lot of nearly-dead torrents so if possible, I'd like that to be the last resort. Of course if there's no choice... Is there at least a way to limit the number of nodes I'm connected to on DHT? Maybe that'd help...

[jewelisheaven]

Check for alternative firmwares or brand/model router specific help?

[HopefulDeath]

Well it's a fairly old model. There is no alternative firmware for it, and the latest official firmware is nearly 3 years old. There isn't much specific information floating around about it. Since it worked fine for a long time, it's probably just the internals starting to fail with age anyway

[jewelisheaven]

In that case, I feel you. I don't know what will happen when my D-Link 704 dies.

That was before various acquisitions and mergers and well before Linux was an option. Before you were restricted to ONE protocol per forwarded port, and before ports had to be forwarded individually.

If you notice anything making it better, it would probably start with limiting connections increasingly more, and reducing more features. You probably wont have to turn off resolve IPs... but I would recommend using eng's flag.conf/bmp distribution. I have heard of people having to limit connections to 20 total for multiple torrents...

In any case, FIGHT THE POWER OF BROKEN HARDWARE!!!!

[Switeck]

Try these "CONSERVATIVE SETTINGS CHANGES":

Turn off DHT (both kinds).

Disable Resolve IPs under the Peers Window. (That's expensive window-dressing considering it doesn't help download+upload speeds any.)

Reduce half open connection max to maybe 1-4. (You're not firewalled in µTorrent, right? ...so it shouldn't hurt as much as you might think!)

Disable resolve country flags in advanced.

Disable "Enable Local Peer Discovery".

If you've manually port forwarded your router, Disable UPnP in µTorrent.

Lastly, reduce total connections to 60 or less.

...maybe even as low as 20 per torrent, though 40 is probably better.

(Belkin routers can't consistently handle over 60 connections TOTAL.)

If you want to still use DHT, reduce all the rest to compensate for it.

[HopefulDeath]

Alrighty then. I tried some of this stuff and I was able to run a torrent while connected to 45 peers and it ran for 5 hours straight with no issues and eventually finished. This is good.

Although I got a little cocky and tried running 2 simultaneous torrents. Despite the fact that I only had about 15 connections between both, my router crashed after 15 minutes. You'd think that one torrent with 45 connections is more strenuous than 2 torrents with 7-8 each but I guess not in my router's case.

Oh well, I can deal with one at a time. Better than nothing. Good enough for me. Thanks

[Switeck]

What's your half open connection max set to?