Thread: What the hell is wrong with my network connection?

Ok I just want to preempt this thread by saying that I am by no means a computer noob, nor am I new to the torrent world.. so please no suggesting of "maybe you should power cycle the router..." etc. However, I am no expert of networking or what is going on with my bandwidth.


Ever since I started allowing multiple torrents to run at once, my home connection has been doing odd things. Now I only allow 5 downloads at once, but a maximum of 50 active torrents. I used to only allow 10 max active torrents, but since I'm trying to ratios for music trackers, I obviously have to be seeding many at once.

I'm running off of Windows XP Pro x64 (i know it's terrible) on a desktop PC with a wired cable connection. I am using uTorrent 2.04. Here is a couple speedtests with 0 torrents running:







Speedtest with uTorrent running at max DL speeds:




My max download speed (in uTorrent) generally levels off at 1.5 MBps. What has been happening the past 3 days is this:

The connection ramps up over the usual "limit" to about 2.1 MBps then falls to 0, I lose connectivity, then about 5 seconds later, connectivity returns, download speeds gradually increase over the usual limit again, reaches some imaginary fuse of 2.1 MBps and starts the cycle again to where I'm losing internet connectivity about once per minute.



Visually: (each line is 1 second)

Stable @ 1.5 MBps for a little while
1.6 MBps
1.7 MBps
1.8 MBps
1.9 MBps
2.0 MBps
2.1 MBps
2.0 MBps
1.9 MBps
1.8 MBps
1.7 MBps
..etc etc until 0 MBps
-lose internet connectivity-
-regain internet connectivity-
0.1 MBps
0.2 MBps
0.3 MBps
etc etc until it levels off at 1.5 MBps.. or goes over the max up to 2.1 then back down again repeating

The cycle continues up and down like a parabola... I'm not too sure what is going on. Anybody willing to hedge a guess? Oh and don't tell me to call my ISP because downloading torrents is against their TOS. And almost got my subscription terminated when I mentioned this over the phone during a tech support call a couple years ago.

I had the same problem with mine but then i reverted back to 1.8.5 and that seemed to solve the problem, try using a different version and see if that helps you

Few versions here http://www.oldapps.com/utorrent.php

Tried both 1.8.5 and the new beta 2.2 neither resolved the issue. I searched utorrent's forums and found this

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic....=15992#p258231

I tried the step of changing bt.transp_disposition to 5 and it worked beautifully. I've let it sit for a little while and it's been stable at 1.5 so far so I tried resetting the bt.transp to it's original setting and sure enough, it became unstable again and cut off my connection.

So I will continue to monitor this and see if it continues.

I have heard that the router, depending on brand and cheapness, crash when their mac tables and routing tables get full and usually reboot, or you have to manually reboot them. I have a cisco rvs4000 and it gets full every week or so but i have max everything.

Just a thought.

Possible causes:
1)Some ISPs tend to create bottlenecks to
choke bandwidth.

Did u change your ISP/plan ?

2) Win XP is pretty old. Each OS has a limit
on the number of TCP connections.Note that
number of connected peers and NOT B/W
will affect this. It is possible that the torrents you are
seeding have too many peers with poor download rates.

Try reducing your "Global maximum number of connections"