Very frequent disk overloads, causing global speed drops?

[zyrobs]

I've been having this problem with utorrent for a very long time now, ever since I got broadband in the 10+mbit range. Every once in a while, utorrent decides to drop speeds COMPLETELY on every torrent, as if everything got paused for a few moments. It then resumes.

As I've upgraded my connection, this issue got progressively worse and worse. I'm thinking it is caused by disk overloads (utorrent not being able to read/write fast enough). Note that currently I have some 700gb stuff loaded in utorrent, spanning over 3 hds, seeding with a 25mbit optical line. But it happened in the past even if I had nearly nothing loaded on a slower connection - at that time, when I downloaded a dvd image from a well seeded torrent, at first the torrent jumped right to max speed. But a few minutes later, it dropped down everything to zero, and "restarted" some moments later, resuming as usual. A friend of mine on a similar speed connection told me that he is also having similar issues.

If I start running an overnight defrag, things get even worse:

It is not the fault of the torrents, as they all have plenty of people on them, enough to max out my speeds indefinetaly.

I've tried configuring the disk cache, enlarging it and configuring it per the faq for large caches, but this still happens often if I use my computer for something - the extra HDD work completely flips out utorrent every single time. Is there a way to fix or avoid this problem? Perhaps I need to set the disk cache to overkill levels?

[Switeck]

Try reducing the upload slots, global and per torrent connection max. Downloading and uploading to fewer ips should result in fewer but bigger disks reads and writes. It's not a fix, but it's about the only suggestion I have at the moment.

[zyrobs]

It made no difference.

But it may be more related to CPU power, not HDD overload. It happens insanely often when I'm playing games, even emulated ones which run from the RAM entirely (no hdd access). The cpu in my computer is pushed to the max in those, and speed dropping seems to happen fairly often at that time.

This still wouldn't explain why I'm getting them when adding a new dvdiso torrent...

[Switeck]

When adding torrents, do you have uTorrent set up to allocate the whole torrent's filesize when first starting?

[zyrobs]

The complete torrent contents are not preallocated on startup, but the full file is written out if one piece is completed. Not sure exactly what you call this in utorrent.