lister Posted January 26, 2006 Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 When I have utorrent running (tried the latest beta and 1.4) I find it difficult to do anything else on the PC. Watching a video will lag/ freaze and then speed up for a moment, opening folders slows, winamp pauses, etc - just general unresponsiveness.I tried disabling DHT, with no effect.specs: Win2k pro SP4, 1gb ram, 2.7 ghz p4, 1 x 80gb, 1 x 250 gb hdd(both new). avast! AV, Zone alarm pro 4.5.594.000. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted January 26, 2006 Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 Make sure your drives are set to UDMA6.Zone Alarm does not work with µTorrent (or most P2P apps for that matter), with the exception of version 6.x, and you have an OLD version.Avast has a few 100% CPU bugs of its own, see if disabling/uninstalling fixes it.How fast are you going? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lister Posted January 26, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 It (ZA) worked fine on versions of µTorrent prior to 1.4.Downloading speed isn't an issue - speed, of course, varies according to the torrent, but I have reached speed up to 200kbs (out of 250 maximum) and have limited the UL speed to about 15 kbs.Personally I don't like the newer versions of ZA, too intrusive, and no more secure as a firewall right - a packets a packet?As long as I set ZA to allow in and outgoing traffic and 'Authenticate program by full path name only' I never have any problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted January 26, 2006 Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 What about the other stuff I mentioned?http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#My.C2.B5Torrent_freezes_locks_up_sometimes_and_or_uses_100_CPU Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lister Posted January 26, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 I'll check that out when I get home, didn't have any trouble with earlier versions: I guess µTorrent gets updated too quickly for avast! to catch up, lol! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AllWeasel Posted January 26, 2006 Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 Sounds like a disk-contention (or a virtual memory caching) issue to me. A CPU issue would stutter in short choppy bursts. Disk battles are slower, have a longer duration, and often exhibit a more pronounced rubberband effect (pauses > 100 MS, sometmes followed by faster-than-normal speed to catch-up). If it's a CPU usage (or memory) issue, you can see it in the task manager or you can just run perfmon to watch cpu and disk traffic to be sure.Make sure the advanced option diskio.flush_files is set to true and check the sparse file settings to disable them. I normally disable the pre-allocation options, but those can offer a trade-off that might work for you in this case. Note, that I have a striped pair of 7200 rpm SATA drives with 8 MB of on-board cache, so my anti-preallocate preference may be biased. Check your write queue size and coalesce settings also. If you're using a large disk cache, it may disrupt other disk usage for a fairly long time as it unloads a bunch of buffers. If you watch videos, you'll want to optimize the disk usage for short bursts of small disk traffic, not big efficient chunks. IOW, disable caching options and flush the files often.If your anti-virus is scanning those files, then that could very well be the real culprit.If you're using a DVD to watch the video, then it may be an IDE bus battle. Again, small short disk traffic is better than large chunks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted January 26, 2006 Report Share Posted January 26, 2006 Avast has a 100% CPU bug when you have the P2P shield on, which I think is on by default. That may be the problem in his case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lister Posted January 27, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 27, 2006 Well, tried disabling µTorrent in the avast p2p scanner, and that seems to have fixed it.I'll let it run as normal and see if the problem is rectified.Thanks for your speedy (& insightful) help Firon! And thanks to you AllWeasel for listing the alternatives! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted January 27, 2006 Report Share Posted January 27, 2006 Glad it worked. If you know of any other Avast users with the same problem, direct them to this link: http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#My.C2.B5Torrent_freezes_locks_up_sometimes_and_or_uses_100_CPU Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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