DHT is killing connectivity

[ovonrein]

This is just a follow-on from, and summary of, http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=467840#p467840.

It will appear (and, judging by some comments from Ultima, I am apparently not the first victim) that DHT is overwhelming standard retail residential setups (like mine, build around a Belkin N Wireless Router).

My problems began when TPB switched off their trackers, leaving many of my torrents bereft of any working tracker and thus switching over to DHT.

DHT is enabled by default in a standard uTorrent installation. I would suggest that it should be set to DISABLED by default (certainly until this issue can be resolved).

From observation, it seemed to me that DHT was consuming more and more connections on my system until there were zero connections left for the actual file sharing activity. That is, my order of events was like so:

(1) Reset the uTorrent port in Options/Preferences/Connections (or restarting the router (to acquire a new IP) would work as well)

(2) There would be plenty of peer acquisition and torrents started to upload and download

(3) Gradually peers would start to fall away (all the while Outpost, the only firewall involved at this point, would report more and more open connections) until there was zero activity (u+d).

At this point, the experiment could be repeated.

I eventually resolved the problem when I disabled DHT whereupon all the trackerless torrents started to acquire their peers via PEX, which works just fine.

I think that you may need to introduce a configuration screen in Options/Preferences such that one can tune the resources dedicated to DHT.

[Ultima]

Try messing with Preferences > Advanced > dht.rate or something.

Quite honestly, I can't see another product's limitations as µTorrent's bugs. If your firewall and/or router feel(s) like counting plain ol' UDP packets as connections, then that's their prerogative, but they'd better make sure they count it correctly and don't cause problems for the applications using UDP.