uTorrent crashes working with large files over GigE

[sherl0k]

I use uTorrent because it works quite well for transferring large files over a network. But it crashes a lot due to the caching system. I've tried playing with all the options but either a) it crashes after a few minutes, or it goes horrendously slow. The clients are beasts, Core i7 processors with 3 gigs of DDR3, running Server 2008. The harddrives are 7200RPM WD's. I just can't get the cache settings right. The server seeding them can push out about 30 megabytes a second to the 5 other clients, splitting it up to around 6MB/client.

Each torrent only has a couple huge files - they can be anywheres between 5 and 8 gigs each - and I think that's causing the problem. I'd rather not split them. Any suggestions?

[Switeck]

What makes you think it's uTorrent's caching system that's causing the crashes?

[sherl0k]

RAM spikes like crazy, using up all of it, followed by the app freezing.

[Switeck]

Is uTorrent's ram cache filling up at those times?

And even if it is...that may be because something on your computer isn't allowing uTorrent to read/write from disk that fast.

[sherl0k]

Yeah, it's uTorrent's RAM cache that's making it spike up like that. I'm not sure it would be any other app causing it though. I can't think of any apps or services that would cause it to be limited. And even if it was, wouldn't uTorrent just slow right down instead of trying to break the "rules" imposed?

[DreadWingKnight]

Could we get a screenshot of your disk cache settings please.

[sherl0k]

This isn't the defaults, I'm more than sure. As I've said, I've been playing with the settings to find one that would give me both speed and stability, but no dice so far.

I've tried enabling uTorrent's caching, but it complains about thrashing and then the speeds drop to sub-100k/sec speeds. I'm assuming because it's waiting for the cache to clear before making another write?

Thanks for looking into this.

[DreadWingKnight]

enable caching of reads and writes

override the automatic size and set it to 512mb

leave the last two options on (bypassing the windows disk cache)

[sherl0k]

Alright, I'll give that a shot.

How about the sub-checkboxes for read and write? Leave them all checked, or does it not matter?

edit:

Alright, I followed what you said and the speeds were only hovering around 1MB/sec, with "disk overloaded" errors happening frequently. So I upped the cache from 512 to 1024 and I'm seeing much better speeds than before, and rarely getting the overloaded error. No crashes so far either, that puts a smile on my face.

Thanks for the help!