No peer discovery

[ovonrein]

I cannot understand why I am having so much trouble with uTorrent recently. I just switched off the firewall on my router because that was somehow interfering. I then briefly had full download and max upload. And now NOTHING. There doesn't seem to be any problem with the actual network. None of the firewalls are recording any blocked traffic. When I restart uTorrent, then usually for a few seconds (sometimes minutes) all is well before all peers drop away again. I am seeding a lot of rare stuff. The scrapes are usually showing <10 seeds and >50 peers. The torrent community should be all over me like a rash. It used to work like this. At the moment, nothing. Can someone please educate me how peer discovery works, and why I am not seeing any traffic? The firewall tells me that there's plenty of inbound traffic on my uTorrent port. Yet nothing comes of it...

To be clear: I am not asking why my speeds aren't any good; I like to know why there's no more than 1 or 2 peers talking to me. If that.

Thanks.

uTorrent 2.0 Build 18488

- seeding purely by seed/peer

- no bandwidth management

- DHT >300 nodes

- fixed port

Belkin router, firewall disabled

Win XP SP3

- Outpost Free Firewall 2009

- AVG AV 9.0

UPDATE #1:

I switched OFF Outpost and switched ON Window's firewall - no change (zero peers).

I disabled the Resident Shield in AVG - no change.

I uninstalled AVG and performed the necessary reboot - no change.

The reboot re-instated Outpost so I turned OFF Window's firewall.

I rebooted the Belkin router - uTorrent is breathing again - full pelt up + down.

Now, I noticed before that when I rebooted the router, that there would be short spell (no more than 5 mins) when there would be some activity on uTorrent. Activity was greatest right after the reset and would peter off until there was no further activity. I cannot find on this forum any mention of incompatibilities between uTorrent and AVG but it seems to me that there is some causal link between Belkin, AVG and uTorrent somewhere. What it might be, I cannot tell. There are no entires in AVG's knowledge base either.

The quest for a new AV program continues. Might give AVAST a shot... At least the new firewall rules appear to be working. For anyone who cares, here are my Outpost rules:

(1) Allow Outbound UDP (all ports)

(2) Allow Outbound TCP (all ports)

(3) Allow Inbound UDP to 1900, 5351-5353, 6771, [myPort]

(4) Allow Inbound TCP to [myPort]

(5) Block (and report) all UDP

(6) Block (and report) all TCP

UPDATE #2:

Installed AVAST 5.0

- minus P2P Shield

- minus Network Shield

- minus Behavior Shield

and immediately uTorrent went the same way as with AVG - shedding peers, until there were none. I then proceeded to turn off the Web Shield. Like before, this did not make uTorrent recover. So I gave the router a kick. When that restarted, uTorrent recovered and so far - with the Web Shield staying off - file sharing seems to be going normally.

UPDATE #3:

No, it's not the AV programs. I switched off AVAST, kicked the router again and despite initial enthusiasm by peers, uTorrent is losing one after another until everything comes to a standstill. There remain only two explanations I can think of:

(1) My ISP (BT) is very effective at shutting down my file sharing (after it detected my IP change). Would be a bit of a coincidence that their effectiveness jumped just as I installed uTorrent 2.0;

(2) Perhaps the uTorrent's scheduling algorithm has changed and now has a preference for high speeds on few peers and neglected peers are withdrawing because they are not getting any bandwidth.

If (2), then this becomes self-defeating because after a while the few remaining peers may slow down for all sorts of reasons and I need new peers to replace them. Yet no-one's talking to me anymore...

One thing that I do notice is that after I kick the router, I can usually run the Bandwidth test of the Setup Guide but when uTorrent gets into this state where there's no peers left, I get all sorts of weird behaviour there, like:

- Server busy;

- Checking queue ... we're #3 (and nothing ever happens after)

- Data send error: Server closed connection (10054)

These tests preempt my file sharing and when I back out of them, I have zero peers. I never succeed in re-acquiring peers thereafter.

UPDATE #4:

Why is it that Outpost reports 150+ open connections against uTorrent when I have configured in Options/Preferences/Bandwidth a "Global maximum number of connections" of only 60? I am not sure how many open connections my Belkin router can handle before it packs up.

How does this work anyway? 150+ open connections and 3 peers? Could someone please explain?

UPDATE #5:

After another spurt of activity following a reset of the router and the subsequent falling away of peers, I am left with 5 active peers and I notice the following in Outpost: of 55 open connections (only!), only 5 are Outbound TCP (presumably my actively connected remaining peers). All the remaining connections are Outbound UDP. (This picture emerged after I ENABLED bandwidth management.) And NOT A SINGLE connection appears to be listening to [myPort]. Surely that cannot be right?

UPDATE #6:

It is not the ISP. Something's screwy with uTorrent. When uTorrent once again got into this state where there were no peers, I was doing some port testing to see whether I could get some response on [myPort]. The port test came back negative: no response. So I thought "perhaps my ISP is suppressing all traffic to that port so let me configure another port." When I changed the port one up, of course the firewall puked. I couldn't be bothered to reconfigure it and instead reverted the port back. And uTorrent immediately sprang back to life!!

UPDATE #7:

Not 100% how uTorrent managed to spring back to life in Update #6 since I believe to have found the reason behind "not listening": when I switched off the firewall on the router, which was initially the cause of problems, I also had disabled the port forwarding. An easy mistake to make the way Belkin arranges the Virtual Server dialogue as a subheading under Firewall. But port-forwarding must stay in place, with or without firewall. With port forwarding in place, I can now finally see [myPort] being open again. And uTorrent has been sustaining 12 clients for the past half hour or so.

UPDATE #8:

I am max'ing out on my upload capacity (and finding new peers) but downloading is woeful. The usual behaviour: I kick the router and after my IP's changed, there's great momentum on my download torrent. Then bit by bit, peers drop away until no-one's left. During the grinding down process, I notice that the peers which break away are flagged "Ud". If I understand correctly, THEY don't want to download to me. Any idea why this might be?

(I am trying OpenOffice at the moment - cannot find any peers.)

Thanks.

[Switeck]

"During the grinding down process, I notice that the peers which break away are flagged "Ud". If I understand correctly, THEY don't want to download to me."

Actually, small "d" flag means their end doesn't want to upload to you. How many connected peers are there, how many upload slots are you allowing, and what's your CTRL+G Speed Guide settings?

Yep, got my wires crossed there.

[ovonrein]

I did not sense that this thread was receiving any love so eventually I started http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=466766#p466766 which attracted your attention, so I guess we can call this closed.

Not sure, actually, what you are hoping to get from CTRL-G - it doesn't show anything until I run the test. Running the test necessarily suspends all torrents. This frightens away all peers and uTorrent will not recover from that (ie will not acquire new peers until I change my port). My line can sustain > 25K up and > 100K down. The last time I managed to max out on the way down was when I downloaded OpenOffice (again). I am not sure how representative OO is as an experiment, mind. It is a torrent that is heavily over-seeded and seeds are a lot more "patient" than on more typical material. My problem is that I acquire typically about 25 peers immediately after I reset uTorrent's port. A little while after it seems that, one after another, the peers somehow become "hacked off" with me and leave - never to be seen again (until activity even on the last peer ceases up and I need to reset the port)...

[Firon]

"During the grinding down process, I notice that the peers which break away are flagged "Ud". If I understand correctly, THEY don't want to download to me."

Actually, small "d" flag means your end doesn't want to upload to them. How many connected peers are there, how many upload slots are you allowing, and what's your CTRL+G Speed Guide settings?

You on crack? Small d means they aren't uploading to you (they have you choked or you haven't requested anything)

[ovonrein]

Firon belatedly showing some tough love. Who's the one on crack? Me or Switeck (or both of us)? I'd appreciate your input, Firon. I must have invested now more than 30hrs trying to crack this one. No joy. As I write this, my last two remaining peers are using up less than 10k up. They'll expire soon and I shall have to reset the port again.

I repeat my key questions (at this time):

* Is it more likely that (a) my uTorrent chokes the peers OR ( the world doesn't wonna talk to me (is my IP:Port combination on some sort of black-list)?

* What are the 100+ connections for (that uTorrent maintains according to Outpost) if there's only two limp peers hanging around?

* What changes (in uTorrent's attitude to its environment) when I reconfigure the port in Options/Preferences/Connections to make all these peers come back (for a short while)?

PS: I just wonna repeat this (since I cannot myself believe it): I cannot make bt.transp_disposition stick to its default of 15 I have changed this setting many a times (because I have an inkling it may have something to do with this) but uTorrent simply ignores my setting and runs with 5 all the time. Any idea what that's all about?

[Firon]

Switeck is.

When you change the number to 15, you have to hit the Set button. Apply will not actually apply it. The advanced settings are really weird like that... You could also just check 'enable bandwidth management', which turns on uTP.

[Switeck]

I corrected my post above. Hopefully, it'll make a little more sense now.

[ovonrein]

Googled upon this: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=213804 Sounds eerily familiar. Alas, no resolution then as now. Can you please comment on Ultima's

As for DHT, you don't really need it unless you are not getting any peers from the tracker, or the torrent is nearly dead. 2wires can't handle all that many "connections" simultaneously, so DHT would probably kill the router anyway.

That bothers me. In the tracker-less world we now live in, DHT and PEX is all we got. If DHT is killing my router, I cannot win: I either disable it and the router's happy but I find no peers OR I enable it to find peers but kill my router.

Now, I have never needed to disable DHT in the past and it has never killed my router. So what's the game? DHT does not wake up unless no peers can be found? My DHT status at the bottom says "334 nodes (Updating)". Which protocol is that? Stateless UDP? Or stateful TCP connections?

Also, is DHT a binary thing? Or is there a way that I can have DHT but control its resource usage (assuming that is actually my problem). Anyone know when exactly TPB went off air? Was that in the past couple of days? Would coincide with all my problems, and would also explain why reverting to 1.8.5 does not fix 'em...

Update #1

Please read about the resolution to this problem here: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=466922#p466922.