Connection issue

[riven]

Howdy folks.

I'm having a severe connectivity issue when using torrent clients. In fact, this has been going on for probably over a year, but it has gotten a bit worse since I've switched to Windows 7. I have followed every FAQ/Guide here, multiple times, to no avail. I'm quite desperate now

Whenever I start a torrent client (in addition to uTorrent, my normal client, I have also tried BitComet, Azureus/Vuze and ABC), my connection...

(WinXP) ... comes to a crawl (affecting my connection in general, not just in the torrent client) and occasionally disconnects for a few seconds

(Win7) ... doesn't really suffer from slowdown, but instead disconnects for a split-second very frequently (figure once a minute or so).

Although very annoying, I could sort of live with the WinXP situation... not so with the Win7 situation

The odd thing is, this starts *immediately* when I open a torrent client... even when there are NO torrents loaded whatsoever... even on a fresh install of OS and torrent client! Shutting down the client and resetting the router fixes everything, until the next time I start a torrent client. All clients cause the exact same behaviour. (Using Opera's build-in torrent client, however, this does not happen.)

Any help much appreciated.

-- riven

[jewelisheaven]

You didn't mention your router make/model?

[riven]

Hi,

Sorry, it's a Linksys BEFSR41.

[jewelisheaven]

Go through Switeck's settings changes ... it sounds like that model has problems with high connection counts. You can find them at http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=34259

Can you mention also the driver version you are using? Have you checked Windows Update and the manufacturer's website for possibly updated Server 2008/Vista SP1 drivers.. as it's unlikely you'd see "Windows 7" listed

Are you finding Windows 7 more useful than Vista?

[Switeck]

1st link in my signature as well.

Your router probably doesn't run well having more than 100 connections at once.

[riven]

As I mentioned, I have gone through all the guides. I have set the number of connections to as low as 10, and disabled or lowered any other setting that could possibly matter as well... as soon as I load uTorrent or any of the other clients I mentioned, the problem starts, even without a single torrent being loaded.

Also note that my router's firmware is up to date, and I have gone through the Linksys user forums. Using other P2P software such as SoulSeek or eMule is 100% fine.

Edit: Oh, also, before this all started, this same router had no problems with high connection counts. But I seriously doubt it has anything to do with connection counts because of the reason detailed in the first paragraph.

[wilykit104]

Hi,

I don't know if this will help in your situation, but I had a similar problem with uTorrent in Vista. Every time I loaded uTorrent my browsing speed would be fine for about a minute, and then I would go onto limited connectivity and have to reset my connection, and the same after another minute, etc.

I followed all the instructions I could find, like limiting the bt.connect_speed to 10, and the ne.max_halfopen to 4, and disabling the UPnP and NAT-PMP port mapping, with no results what-so-ever.

However, after seeing that a lot of people seem to have similar problems in Vista and Win 7, on a hunch I clicked the setting in properties (i.e. right click on the uTorrent shortcut icon, and go to properties at the bottom), and on the compatibility tab, ticked the "run this program in compatibility mode for:" button. I have mine set for compatibility with Windows XP (Service Pack 2), and I have not had any connection problems since. You can also set it for compatibility with other older windows versions.

Is there a similar sort of thing you could try with Windows 7? I'm not at all familiar with it, so I don't know, but I hope this helps!

Good luck!

Ps - I think I had to reboot my computer before this setting took affect.

[riven]

Thanks for the suggestion, wilykit104. I had tried that, to no avail, unfortunately.

---

I'd like to add that since my last post, I have discovered that the problem also occurs with Live Messenger, so the issue is not limited to torrent clients. On the other hand, I mistakenly identified ABC as a troublesome client in my original post -- it appears that ABC works absolutely fine.

There must be something that these troublesome torrent clients and Live Messenger (and who knows what other applications) have in common that causes this behaviour, but I cannot imagine what.

Any insight still very much appreciated.

[Switeck]

"as soon as I load uTorrent or any of the other clients I mentioned, the problem starts, even without a single torrent being loaded."

DHT is active the moment you start uTorrent UNLESS disabled completely. This is the most likely thing to cause problems at startup.

Resolve IPs becomes active the moment you start getting peer/seed connections, at least if you're looking at the Peers window. It also needs to be disabled on marginal networking hardware and software.

It's remotely possible if you were on many extremely busy torrents shortly before and the router was port-forwarded, that the flurry of incoming connections could be pretty high even when uTorrent starts up. But unless you're getting many 100's of incoming connections per minute this should NOT be a problem. ...Were it extremely bad, it would be a problem just starting up windows.

uTP connections can only come from v1.8.0 and up...but only v1.9 is set to make them by default. You need to run v1.8.3 or v1.9 (specially configured) to block them if they prove a problem. Hopefully, by the time of v1.9 stable build uTP will be more reliable. Right now, it's making lots of little UDP packets which flood marginal routers.