Pingstormed???

I am presenting using 1.6.1-490 on an XP system with AVG Free (anti-virus) and PeerGuardian installed. Symantec, Mcaffee, ZoneAlarm or similar are NOT installed. I am in the US; provider is Comcast (cable internet, max upload bandwidth is approx. 50kbs).

Description of problem: I'll be uploading merrily along for about ten minutes to half an hour after launch, with lots of peers and getting my maximum upload speed. Then, upload speed will begin to dwindle and peers drop, and I'll then begin losing connection to some of the trackers as they appear under the General tab. Meanwhile, PeerGuardian's blocked IPs display will be going nuts until I quit uTorrent. Generally I must wait either a long period of time, or restart my cable box or my computer, or both, in order to get full bandwidth again. If I launch the same .torrent in BitTornado, I get fewer peers but don't have the problems with pingstorming by apparent fake-bots. If I use Azureus, I have the problem to a lesser extent, and get a few more peers than BitTornado but not as many as I do when uTorrent is working at its best.

I've tried stepping down my maximum upload speed, and also starting with it low, but to no effect. Enabling or disabling DHT and/or protocol encryption appears to have no effect, nor does fiddling with the number of connectable peers per torrent. Changing hardware bits such as cables (and even the computer I'm using) doesn't help.

I'd like to know what "Advanced" settings I could adjust next to attempt to solve this.

Check the first link in my signature regarding overloaded connections. Make *sure* you followed the Speed Guide properly.

I think I've figured this out on my own. It has nothing to do with ports, I know that much. I tried manually removing trackers one at a time, and that helped a lot (most of the "hits" in PeerGuardian were associated with particular trackers). My speeds recovered noticably, although there's still quite a bit of variability....I'll be 200down/40up/30peers one minute, and 30down/20up/15peers awhile later, then back again.

My provider also appears to have oversold its bandwidth. It's as if I'm watering the lawn and my kid is periodically kinking the garden-hose.

I'd like to see something done to pro-actively deal with flood attacks in future versions.

Thanks for the attention.

That's just like telling your phone to stop random people from calling you -- you can't proactively deal with incoming connections.

For such over-loaded torrents, just disable DHT.

You can also lower your half open limit in µTorrent all the way to 1.

...If you're not firewalled, you'll get overloaded with incoming connections anyway.

OR you can intentionally firewall yourself and block 'hostile' ips using ipfilter.dat

...but speeds may suffer that way.