Disk space "leak"

[BZFlagLEGOManiac]

Most people are familliar with the concept of a memory leak - a program allocates memory but doesn't release it properly. Over time the "used" memory builds up without ever beening released until the computer crashes.

I've consistantly observed under XP Pro and utorrent 1.7.7 that my disk space usage on C: would continually drop from 95GB to (say) 10MB when using utorrent. Closing utorrent does not release the space but rebooting the PC does. Downloading large files or large numbers of files with a web browser does not do this. I've only been able to reproduce this with utorrent.

As an attempted work-around, I installed two more hard disks (60 and 40GB) and set them as the targets for the downloads. I initially had the 60GB drive installed and mounted it in a directory but, when the problem persisted I installed the 40GB as a completely separate drive letter. The problem persisted no matter wheter the extra physical space was made part of the file structure on C: or sepparated as drive Y:.

I decided to limit myself to a maximum of 6 running torrents and the problem went away.

[jewelisheaven]

... there are reports of this however you don't give any sort of way to reproduce it.

Also what kind of connection do you have to think you can download 6 torrents simultaneously? You realize of course the more concurrent torrents you run the more your download and more importantly upload is spread thin, thereby making you appear as a lower bandwidth peer which puts you at lower priority for their upload.

[GTHK]

jewelisheaven, there are reports of disk space going missing? Is that why Vista reported that it reclaimed disk space on a drive I scanned? I thought my drive was failing :/.

[jewelisheaven]

I couldn't tell you for sure. I don't recall OS specifics in those cases. I recall two or three reports since the new year. I don't know exactly what's up... I'd imagine it has to do with pre-allocation, but I could be wrong.

[Firon]

This is not a utorrent bug.

This is likely some stupid AV or something similar unpacking compressed files to disk over and over.

[BZFlagLEGOManiac]

To address some of the replies I've received:

- if this was an A/V problem, I would expect to see it when downloading torrents with Opera but this seems to be utorrent specific.

- I'm sorry I can't give more specifics that would help in reproducing the problem. All I know is that the problem went on for weeks while a dozen simultaneous torrents downloaded. I was going to be away from my computer for a week and, rather than download 1 or 2 torrents, have them complete the next day, and have the computer do diddly for the rest of the week, I decided to download a whole whack of torrents, knowing they would all progress slowly. I expected that, on my return, all or most of them would be completed but I found my computer crashed instead.

With the dozen downloads already in progress I let things go for a few weeks after and observed what I reported - the disk space leak on C:. Mounting a spare hard disk to my torrent download directory within the file structure of C: didn't help.

- I arrived at the 6 torrent limit by adding torrents until my download rate reached about 80% of my available download bandwidth. Granted, this depends upon the swarm but I was trying to strike a balance downloading quickly and ensuring that the downloading takes place while I'm away from my computer for days at a time.

BTW. my thanks to Ultima for posting a concise common proceedures guide. For people like me without a lot of time to browse it's very helpful to have these instructions in one place. I'll be looking into his recommendations over the next couple of weeks as I get the time. Perhaps this will address some of they other problems I've reported.

[Switeck]

DSL, Bell Canada ISP doesn't make for a "fast line" as far as BitTorrent is concerned.

They've got some pretty active, pretty nasty BitTorrent disruption going...and it's spreading to more areas.

I doubt it's connected to your problem.

Perhaps you should try using the queueing system in uTorrent.

If you set it right, it will only start so many torrents at once and queue up the rest...to finish them in order added. You can change the queue order after start as well.

This will keep the connection busy for longer but not TOO busy...hopefully...at any given time.

You can also use the minimum download+upload speed settings in the latest v1.8 betas to have uTorrent start MORE torrents if the current ones are going too slowly.

...As for your disk leak, do you have any media indexers, Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), antivirus software, software firewalls on your computer?

Probably best just to run Process Explorer and HijackThis! and see what they find!