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uTorrent constantly using extra mysterious bandwidth


Viper007Bond

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uTorrent has been doing something funky for the past few weeks: it uses "extra" bandwidth. Let me explain.

I have all torrents paused right now and they have been for a minute or two (to make sure they really are paused). I did this by right-clicking the tray icon. However my bandwidth meter is showing an equal amount of bandwidth in and bandwidth out at the rate of about 38KB/sec (uTorrent is displaying 15-20KB/sec each way). If I exit uTorrent, my meter will immediately drop to 0 bandwidth used.

If I resume all torrents and cap my upload at 25KB/sec, uTorrent reports it's uploading at 44KB/sec (give or take a KB or two). However if I sum up the 5 or so currently active torrents, they're only using the 25KB/sec that I limited uTorrent to.

I'm on Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit and uTorrent 1.8.2 with DHT disabled. I have about 1000 active torrents running (this is nothing new and it only grows by a half dozen a day), but only a few uploading at a time usually (they're all waiting for peers). I have NOD32 2.7 installed, but only the anti-virus running (the Internet monitor thing is disabled). Can provide any additional details -- just ask.

Any ideas what in the heck is going on?

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Any RSS feeds going? Those can suck bandwidth even when torrents are paused.

Connection churn can use surprising amounts of bandwidth, especially retrying seeds.

DHT alone might explain some of your trouble...but I thought it topped out around 64 kilobits/second bandwidth use.

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Any RSS feeds going? Those can suck bandwidth even when torrents are paused.

3-4. Disabled them all for now to see if that helps. I did change rss.update_interval to "10" rather than "15" as two of my feeds get busy during TV nights (don't wanna miss anything), but I'll reset that.

Connection churn can use surprising amounts of bandwidth, especially retrying seeds.

So I should consider trimming torrents? I guess it's about time I deleted crap from a year ago or whatever and freed up some hard drive space, heh.

Oh, and I recounted -- I only have about 600 torrents that aren't stopped.

DHT alone might explain some of your trouble...but I thought it topped out around 64 kilobits/second bandwidth use.

utorrent.png

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Nope, I'm on a home network. No local peers.

The "extra" bandwidth also seems to grow over time. Here's a graph of my bandwidth for the past hour. I'm seeding torrents, so some upload is real, but I'm not downloading anything right now, so all of the green is the "extra" bandwidth. Note the red actual bandwidth line always being above the cap (the flat red line).

utorrentgraph.png

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Ok, to eliminate possible causes...time to try some more extreme settings!

After uTorrent is already up-and-running, temporarily set:

net.max_halfopen = 0

bt.connect_speed = 0

Protocol Encryption, DISABLE allow incoming legacy connections.

Enable Limit Local Peer Bandwidth.

Reduce global and per-torrent connection max to 100 or less.

Check your Logger tab in uTorrent to see that there's LOTS of ips blocked from connecting because they're either not using encryption OR because you've reached connection max. Hopefully, upload speed drops to what you set it to. If that's not the case...something stranger still is going on!

A BitTorrent dev suggested to me on IRC: "also see if stopping the torrents works instead of pausing. also turn off encryption and wireshark it"

Stopping huge numbers of torrents and just leaving the few active ones with peers to upload to might be worthwhile to test...I don't deem it likely, but at this point we have to entertain the idea that maybe one/some of your torrents are somehow causing this.

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Logging allowed me to find that one of my RSS feeds had moved and the redirect wasn't proper, so it was failing to update. I fixed the URL so it was correct and thought that had fixed it (it was basically running at intended bandwidths last night, minus maybe 5KB/sec over the upload), but come this morning it's back to usual.

Nothing is downloading and yet uTorrent is reporting 15KB/sec download and my bandwidth meter is reporting 35KB/sec. It's the same thing for uploading too.

I made the changes you recommended, but it's still doing it. I also don't see any blocked connection items coming up in the log even though I enabled it (Peer Traffic Logging -> Log blocked connections).

I'll go ahead and stop some torrents, but it's a pain as I have certain ones stopped that need to stay stopped. But if it fixes this issue, it'll be worth it.

I'll report back.

UPDATE:

Closed uTorrent and re-opened it a while later. With the "locked down" settings, it's not using any bandwidth whatsoever (as expected as there's been no connections).

Off to slowly re-enable some of the settings.

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  • 5 months later...

Is this a bug? I had the same happen to me yesterday... 2.2MB/s was being downloaded, and yet I have nothing in my download list, all RSS feeds were disabled, and it wasnt until I exited the application properly (sometimes I kill the process via CLI from a remote location), and started it back up a few minutes later, that it stopped downloading...

Also, I have no idea what was being downloaded, or where it was being downloaded to... But it was only this morning I managed to fix it - so it was downloading at ~2MB/s all night with nothing to show for all that bandwidth used...

Im running version 1.8.3 (the latest I think?)...

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