Recieve buffer count. Whats it do?

[BoomAM]

Hi.
Ive been trying to solve some stability problems on my PC that i belive is related to my torrent client and my network card driver. Client is ABC, Network card is Netgear FA311.
There are no new network drivers on the Netgear website(there doesnt even seem to be a WinXP section!).
So i was looking through the settings in ABC and my network drivers.
In ABC, i can limit the number of peers im connected to. It was set to unlimited, as per the program reccomendations, ive lowered it to 60.
Also, the recieve buffer count, in my network drivers is set to 40. Is this related to the number of peers in ABC in anyway? Would increasing it help? What would you reccommend?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Nothinman]

That would be the amount of buffers allocated by the driver for recieving network packets, when the data is recieved it has to be put somewhere right a way and that's those buffers. I'm not exactly sure how Windows does it, but generally when an interrupt happens a small part of the NIC driver (called a bottom-half or tasklet in Linux) will copy the data out of wherever the NIC put it for later processing by the rest of the driver. If the recieve buffers is too low you should get packet loss, nothing more, and upping the value may help but it will probably just delay the problem a bit.

 

[BoomAM]

Any ideas then? Should the problem be fixed somewhat reducing the peer limit from unlimited to 60?

 

[Nothinman]

Possibly, it's hard to tell without a better description of what instability you're experiencing. Is it only bittorrent? Can you transfer files via FTP with no problems?

As an semi-related anecdote, my new notebook has a RealTek 8169 10/100/1000 NIC in it and any time I transferred over like 1M/s for any period of time the NIC would just stop working. I assume it was just the driver getting confused and not servicing interrupts any more, but everything else worked fine and there was no opps on the console. In my case it was a driver issue, I found a reworked r8169 driver and it's been working fine ever since even at gigabit speeds. But you may be screwed since NetGear doesn't have any drivers other than what MS ships, you could try booting up Knoppix as a test. I'm not sure if it comes with a bittorrent client but it wouldn't be too hard to put one on the ramdisk after it's booted up and atleast it would tell you if it's a problem with the driver you're using.

 

[BoomAM]

It seems to either A) Lock up everything running. Or B) Make it so the network connection is still there, but i cant access the net at all. via email, http or torrent.