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Periodic crash of uTorrent program


Urga

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I've seen this crash behaviour in uTorrent 1.1.3-1.1.5:

uTorrent.exe crashes periodically every few minutes, asks to send the dump to the developers, and restarts. Repeat until the dump volume fills up. When it doesn't crash, uTorrent loads the specified torrents nicely, if only in very small chunks until the next crash.

Unfortunately, I can't even have uTorrent send the dump to developers via its built-in mechanism because the process freezes immediately if I click "yes" in the respective dialog box.

I'm running uTorrent 1.1.5 (and 1.1.3/1.1.4 before) on Windows XP SP2 under a non-privileged user account. The uTorrent binary directory and all torrent folders are writable by this user. The listen port is opened in my PF, all outgoing ports are allowed.

I'd be happy to provide the developers with a number of crash dump files. Please provide me with uploading instructions because - as I said before - the integrated crash reporting feature of uTorrent freezes the process.

(Just for the record: BitComet works perfectly here, but I'd like to replace it with a leaner client)

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Yes, the crash occurs during the download of torrents (I've tried loading a single torrent and up to three simultaneous torrents).

There is no obvious event that I could connect with the crash. I load the torrent file(s) from disk, uTorrent detects some peers, uTorrent connects to some peers, downloading starts ("Networking OK"), and at some point during the download it crashes.

Seems that with 1.1.5 the process generally freezes as a result of the detected crash, whereas in 1.1.3 and 1.1.4 I was able to get it to restart itself if I didn't try to send the crash dump.

After a manual restart the behaviour is basically the same, only times until the first crash appear to vary.

I tried running uTorrent without loading anything, and it just sat there peacefully for several minutes and didn't crash. I got bold, loaded a .torrent file, and voilà - crash.

BTW, running as a privileged user doesn't work for me, either.

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Let me guess, you use the fritz!dsl firewall service.

We got a lot of crash dumps from systems using that particular software..

If this is the case, we're trying to figure out why the crash happens.

If not, this is a new issue. We'll need more info -- like what firewall/antivirus software you use, whether or not it happens with ALL torrents, etc.

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I am having the same problem when I try to add torrents in 1.1.5. I save torrents to the desktop. When I click File>Add Torrent, a box comes up to pick a torrent. Sometimes I haven't even picked one yet and it crashes. Other times I pick a torrent and click Open to add it, and it crashes. Sometimes it works fine, but I haven't been able to add more than a couple of torrents at a time and it crashes. It asks if I want to send a crash dump to the developers and I click Yes, then utorrent starts back up. I didn't have this problem when I was using 1.1.4.

I am using Charter Communications cable modem through a Microsoft MN-500 Wireless Base Station connected to my laptop with an ethernet wire. I'm using port 9801, which is forwarded through the router and I get the Network OK message at the bottom. Nod32 anti-virus is running with utorrent.exe in the IMON exclusion list. PeerGuardian 2 is running using the bluetack block list, all other default lists are disabled. ewido security suite and Spywareblaster are running.

The crashes only happen when trying to add a torrent. After it restarts, it checks the torrents and starts back up, but I keep getting a "disk overloaded" message in the little box next to the "Network OK" box, and it freezes my computer momentarily. When this happens, my disk activity LED stays lit, but my CPU usage is only 0-1%. This happens with the "flush file cache" turned on or off.

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My comp also experienced same prob, my utorrent crashed twice when I was d/l-ing a 180 MB movie... They were the memory dump thingie, and I opted to send them over to admins.. I've forwarded the listen port on my router as well

Btw my comp's running on winXP sp1 and I'm using McAfee Firewall, FYI.. my utorrent version is 1.1.5

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Hi guys by crash$$$$$$ do you mean system reboots and says your system has suffered a serious error type crash,because that's been happening since using utorrent,l take there is no fix for this as yet,shame really because works fairly well,except for no option to kick and ban :twisted:

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Sorry to bring this up again, but unfortunately as of version 1.1.7.2 I'm still unable to run uTorrent for anything longer than a minute without the program freezing and dumping a crash report.

The crash seems unrelated to loading a .torrent file from disk, and my network status is reported as "Network OK". It may well be that the fritz!web application is at the root of the problem - although the uTorrent listening port is definitely enabled.

Once again I'd like to offer what little help I can contribute (such as any number of crash reports). Please indicate if you see any chance of fixing this annoying behaviour in the next couple of revisions.

Cheers,

Urga

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Well, seems that fritz!webprotect is not the perpetrator after all.

I just tried running uTorrent with webprotect disabled and still got the periodic crash behaviour.

My other - possibly relevant - software: Windows XP SP2, Kerio PF 4.2.2, avast! virus scanner, Microsoft AntiSpy.

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And another status update.

While fiddling with several firewall settings I noticed that the crash appears to be related to uTorrent trying to write cached data to disk. There is an ominous accumulation of crashes around 1MB of downloaded data. Sometimes it happens earlier, and I've been able to download as much as 3,4 MB on one occasion, but most of the time my uTorrent instance freezes promptly as soon as 1MB of data were downloaded.

This is at uTorrent 1.1.7.2's standard settings for diskio write_queue_size and delay.

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If you want to check the condition of your HDD, download Speedfan and install it. Run it, go to the SMART tab, select your HDD and then see what it says (if you are unsure as to what it all means just post your Fitness and Performance percentage values by hovering your mouse over the blue bars at the bottom) :)

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@Fillado: Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I can't perform a SMART scan on the drive in question because it is connected to my onboard RAID controller (although without RAID enabled - simpyl the 3rd HD in my system).

I doubt, though, that the HD is at fault because BitComet doesn't seem to mind it in the least, and also I once configured uTorrent to use a different physical HD which didn't change anything.

@ludde: Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be such an easy correspondence to write queue size - if it is related to the queue at all. When I increase write_queue_size to 10 MB the majority of crashes occurs between 1.4 and 1.9 MB (also went up to as much as 2.6 MB, but crashed at 300kB and 600kb, too).

Activating two torrents at the same time leads to a more erratic behaviour with crashes as soon as 85 kb downloaded. I can start a download, suspend it at 700kb or so, and uTorrent will wait happily for as long as I want. Then I resume the download, and as soon as it picks up again, the crash occurs.

This all happened with write_queue_size at 10000.

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Hello Urga,

I just want to come back to Fritz!Webprotect.

You wrote you disabled it.

Did you only diasabled it or did you uninstalled it?

If only disabled, maybe uninstall will work.

As I told you, I had the same problems until I uninstalled Fritz!Webprotect and switched to Zonealarm.

Good luck

trunkenbold

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Hi trunkenbold,

thanks for the advice, but I'm definitely not switching to ZoneAlarm.

Also, could you elaborate on how you think fritz!webprotect could possibly have an adverse effect on uTorrent if the process is not running? I made very sure of that.

Could be that my Kerio Personal Firewall interferes with uTorrent, but disabling Kerio is simply not an option, and I still don't see why BitComet (and a score of other networking tools) should be totally unfazed by the firewall and uTorrent should crash.

It's probably some oddity in my software installation, since many users appear to have uTorrent running without any problem. Still - I don't think I'd like to pull out my firewall installation from under my system without hard proof that that's what's causing the crashes.

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Hi Urga,

please don't understand me wrong.

I don't want to bring you to Zonealarm. This was only the alternative I had after uninstalling Fritz.

I think that Fritz!Webprotect can cause problems even when disabled. Don't ask me why. I only can remember that I tried another firewall time ago and for that I only disabled Fritz. I had many problems with this installation, even complete system crashes.

Everything was fine after uninstalling Fritz. Later on I switched back because the other firewall was protected.

So when you use Kerio firewall why don't you just uninstall Fritz!Webprote? It is no longer needed.

I can only tell you what helped me, the rest is your personel decision.

trunkenbold

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