Connection Drops During Fast Downloads

[dezzo]

I have this annoying problem where my connection seems to drop whenever I am downloading at high speeds.

I started a few torrent downloads tonight and then suddenly my MSN and Yahoo messengers started disconnecting and reconnecting several times per minute.

I thought maybe my router was getting overloaded and restarting, but when I logged into the router to check, it says it hasn't been restarted in over 4 days.

I had 4 torrents downloading, with a combined download speed of 1500 KiloBytes (13 MegaBits) per second.

Upload speed was about 200 KiloBytes (1.63 MegaBits) per second.

My actual DSL upload speed is 225 KiloBytes (1.85 MegaBits) per second, and I've got uTorrent's upload speed capped so that it doesn't max out my upload.

I asked the company that makes the router (Senao/Engenius) about the maximum number of BitTorrent connections it can handle, and their reply was that it can handle up to 18,000 connections, has 32MB RAM, and uses the Ralink 3052 chipset.

Once the torrents finished downloading, all the disconnects stopped.

I'm using uTorrent 1.8.4 16688 on Vista32 SP2.

Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a way to fix it?

[JohnnyGrey]

Did you notice the connection drop with uTorrent? How about surfing the web?

Usually routers have a setting, or a time limit rather before it drops and forgets idle connections. Instant Messaging programs, Steam, Xfire, etc, are the connections most prone to get dropped, due to an idle connection. It's possible your router could be changing this time limit on the fly when it detects p2p traffic, or just a major increase in the amount of connections. The router mistakenly thinks that your instant messaging programs' connections are no longer being used, because no traffic is being sent or recieved.

I'm just guessing, I have no idea. But if it is that setting, it's usually called TCP Timeout, UDP Timeout, Connection Timeout, or something relating to the word "timeout." Some router firmware's might not even have this setting, so you might have to dig around for it.