BitTorrent messing up router

J

jursamaj

Registered
I have used Azureus on this computer with this cable modem for over 2 years with no problem. Recently, I bought a new Mac Mini. I bought a router to hook them all up (Belkin G Wireless F5D7234-4 v4, firmware up-to-date). Everything works nicely.

Except, now whenever I start up Azureus, web pages either load very slowly or not at all, usually hanging up on contacting the server. Likewise, my email program is unable to fetch or deliver mail reliable. As soon as I shut down Azureus, these problems clear up.

I'm still able to transfer files between the 2 machines while this is going on, it's just that neither one can reliably get through to the Net.

(I thought UPnP might be a problem, so I shut that off in Azureus and forwarded the ports manually in the router. No change.)

I don't think this is in any way connected, but I've noticed I can't set the admin password on the router. If I do, it appears to accept it, but then I can't log back into the router with either the default or my new password.
 
Sounds like you're letting Azureus connect to too many peers. Limit the number of peers you can connect to and I think you'll see your problems disappear.

Too many outbound/inbound connections (i.e., peer connections) can bring a router to its knees.
 
Well, I cut "Max simultaneous outbound connection attempts" from 24 to 12, and "Max outstanding outbound connections" from 2048 to 1024. Appears to be working much better now. (Of course, I wasn't actually downloading any new torrents...)

I still had a "Firewalled" warning, so I tried turning UPnP back on. Everything bogged down again. :(

So I turned it off: still bad.
Maybe Azureus doesn't release the ports when you turn it off? So I shut down Azureus altogether: got better.
Restart Azureus: bad again.

I'm stumped.
 
jursamaj said:
So I shut down Azureus altogether: got better.
Restart Azureus: bad again.

I'm stumped.
Click to expand...

I'm not. Stop using torrents. Or shut the service down when you are not using it. Could even be your ISP limiting your bandwidth with the torrent client running?
 
Torrents are useful, so I'm not going to quit using them.

It's quite common for me to be using that service and want to do other things on the net at the same time. So "shut it off when not using it" doesn't address when I do want to use it.

It's not the ISP. Azureus itself gets plenty of up and down traffic, it's other apps that get starved. And as I said, it was working just fine before, with no change other than the router added in.

Any useful suggestions?
 
jursamaj said:
Any useful suggestions?
Click to expand...

Useful?
Your router seems to be causing your problem.
You can alleviate that by limiting your use of torrents.
As you don't want to do that (why not?), then replace your router with one that is more tolerant of your 'net use. There may also be some setting in the router configuration that could prove helpful. There may be help at the router manufacturer's web site, even a firmware update for the router ? ?
 
DeltaMac: I did mention in the 1st paragraph of the 1st post that the firmware was up-to-date. And limiting use of torrents isn't helpful. As stated, sometimes I need to have a torrent running, which may take hours or days, and I'd like to be able to look at websites and check my mail during that period. I've tried changing setting in the router, and didn't have any luck. That's why I asked here. (If you've ever tried to get support on an issue like this from a manufacturer website, you probably wouldn't suggest that either...)

icemanjc: It's not at all obvious that Azureus is the problem. As stated, Azureus was working fine before the router was added. If it is somehow overloading the router, a different p2p app is likely to do the same.
 
I find that more than around 600 simultaneous connections tends to kill most routers, especially over wireless.

Can you try limiting your peers once again, this time playing around with a maximum of 300 connections? If that works, you can slowly bump that number up, testing each time, stopping at a maximum of, say, 600.

I know Azureus works great for you, but there's no harm in trying Transmission -- you never know, it just may work. Not all bittorrent clients are the same, and they don't all use the exact same procedure or methodology for connecting to peers. Just because one is a router-killer doesn't mean that another similarly-configured client is a router-killer as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top