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Bittorrent killing my cable modem?

H

HeaterCore

Senior member
OK, lets see if you guys can be more helpful than Time Warner's customer "service."

Usually my connection is A-OK -- solid transfer rates, excellent pings, reliable. Using Bittorrent screws it up royally, though. As soon as I start a torrent, DNS goes down (for the most part). Clicking a link, or even querying Google, leaves Firefox saying "Looking up xxxxx.com" until it says "xxxxxx.com could not be found." (I say "for the most part" because occasionally, one or two sites will work normally even though the vast majority of the internet is still inaccessible.) Thing is, if I ping a known IP, everything appears normal.

Also, rebooting and powering down the modem for a few minutes seems to help a bit in that I can again browse the web, albeit a bit more slowly and quirkily. But then my pings in online games are #@$^ed for the next day or two -- ping will be fine for 15-30 seconds, and then will shoot up to 800 for three to five seconds, and then repeats.

I know (or at least think I know) it's not my system or software. The problem is the same whether I use the onboard NF4 LAN or the Marvell Gigabit adapter, and even after a fresh Windows install. It's the same in all online games, and with IE6 and Thunderbird as well. (It's particularly annoying not to be able to get to your email....)

So, after three hours dealing with my cable company, here I am. Any ideas?

-hc-
 
Originally posted by: nweaver
quit using BT?

Really, how many linux distros (about the only legit use I can see) does one guy need?
Click to expand...
Yep, thats about the only advice you are going to get around here.
 
Originally posted by: nweaver
quit using BT?

Really, how many linux distros (about the only legit use I can see) does one guy need?
Click to expand...

Well, you're half right. The answer to that, so far, has been two -- Fedora and Debian -- though I have since discovered that I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn to manage a Linux box. I also use Azureus to bypass capped services like Fileplanet to download game demos and patches, most recently the 600MB+ F.E.A.R. and COD2 demos and BF2 1.03, which weighs in at over 130MB; and to download larger FOS apps, like the OpenOffice 2.0 beta. All of this works (or at least used to) damned well; because of the population density in the NYC area, Bittorrent downloads routinely max out my 600K/s connection.

The only legally questionable use I've made is grabbing two episodes of HBO's "Rome" that my wife and I missed while on vacation. But as an HBO subscriber watching HBO shows within the confines of my own home (fair use if I've ever seen it) I fail to see much difference between this and using a DVR; the only reason I mention the legal aspect is that the nature of Bittorrent means that, while downloading, I most likely sent packets to people who are not HBO subscribers.

But hey, what was I expecting, asking a question about malfunctioning hardware? On the internet, you're guilty until proven innocent, and genuinely useful technology is written off as the sole province of scofflaw script kiddies.

Thanks anyway.

-hc-
 
Azures is a bandwidth hog. Plain and simple. I've switched to regular Bittorrent and now even uTorrent and have found things WAY better. Azures:Windows as uTorrent/Bittorrent:Linux. Make sense? I hope so, at least that's how I kind of follow it.

Understand that I've had the same issue, probably not as bogged down to the point where I had to restart or unplug my cable modem to reset it, but I've had sites just time out because Azures took up all the bandwidth. Options that you may want in Azures can be found in uTorrent(thank god because I wouldn't have switched otherwise) and you can always set bandwidth priority(high, normal, low). Bittorrent + Bandwidth can work well together if you use the right program. Stay away from Azures.
 
Ah, that's more like it. Thanks, I'll give uTorrent or another client a try. Probably won't solve the problem altogether (since it persists after a reboot, and so is probably hardware-related) but might make it manageable.

-hc-
 
Let's get more information. When was the last time ur net worked just fine, can u think of any changes that you made? Do you have other devices that can connect to your network and if yes, how do they run? Are you using your own router? What other devices connect to your network?
 
Originally was on a router, but thinking it might be the problem I wired the modem straight into my PC. On the router, the problem occurred on three separate computers, so it can't be specific to this machine. Didn't change anything hardware-wise. The only thing I can think is that once after initiating a DL I got the faintest whiff of something burning. I thought at the time it was my PC or possibly the router; a failure that severe should've farked the modem altogether, though, wouldn't it?

In the meantime, after noticing how hot the little ah heck was running I've pried the cover off the modem. Sure enough, the central chip is way too hot to touch. I've put an old Zalman chipset heatsink on it to see if reducing the heatload makes any difference. (You know, beyond voiding the warranty.)

-aMp-

 
Stock 400, but I never run more than a single torrent at a time, so the functional max is 100 connections. I tried lowering that to 80 to see if it made a difference, but no dice.

That reminds me -- say I'm connected to 100 peers, 20 seeds and 80 leechers, all fully established. Of those maybe 10 will actually show any traffic. Is that normal? I mean, if I'm fully connected to a seeder, shouldn't I be getting some packets from him? If a leecher doesn't have any pieces I'm missing and I don't have any pieces he needs, shouldn't the connection drop to allow a more profitable one (either to me or him)?

-hc-
 
I have a very small upload (60KBps). Whenever this maxes out for a long tiem, my modem gets screwed up. I simply used Azureus to set a bandwith limitation and now things are fine.
 
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