Torrents causing WiFi connections to drop?

[unpossible]

I've had this problem for awhile now, and I don't know how to solve it.

I have several systems connected to a Linksys WRT54g router running Hyperwrt 2.1b1 + Thibor15c. My computer is connected via ethernet cable, while the rest are over WiFi. Whenever I have torrents running (uTorrent 1.7.7) on my system, my other computers get very spotty connections, to the point where they sometimes can't even see the router. And this only happens when I have torrents up. My connection otherwise on my system (websurfing, gaming, IM) is fine.

For uTorrent, I've used the speedguide to set my connection to xx/1Mbit (my actual upload is bit faster than that). I haven't touched any other settings.

Do I need to tweak something on utorrent or on the router?

 

[akshatp]

I think its something to do with the number of incoming requests/searches bottlenecking your connection. I have the same problem with torrents, which is why i dont use them anymore. It always fux0red up my connection to the point where I had to reboot the router and cablemodem multiple times to fix it so I just gave up.

 

[Griffinhart]

The WRT54G only can handle 8 simultaneous connections. It typically crashes, reboots, or exibits some other annoying behaviour when that limit is hit. You're going to need to limit your bit torrents allowed connections to something the router can handle. Other than that you'd need to get a router than can handle more.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Yeah most firmware / drivers for most wireless routers / NICs are badly broken and they will crash under sustained load / heavy load.

You'll have to shop around quite a lot to find one that's actually reliable with lots of connections and a large throughput of data. Unfortunately I have relatively cr*ptacular ones myself, so I can't make any good suggestions.

Actually I'll make ONE suggestion which is that a good wireless NIC plus a *PC* used as a router / firewall is probably going to be a million times more secure / reliable than using a "wireless router".

Of course that's a pain to administer and you'll have to find a NIC that works well with "hostap" type software if you want the NIC to look like an AP, other wise you'll have to use p2p/ad-hoc type connections to it.

It isn't a bad way to use an old outdated PC, though, especially since you can start to add in QOS type bandwidth management to its configuration so you can prioritize your interactive / media traffic over your background stuff.

 

[heymrdj]

Upgrade to a Dlink DIR-655 for good BT performance. It's like 120$ though..gotta have the $$$ for such a good router. Supports DraftN though..that's a plus.

 

[robmurphy]

I use utorrent, but have the uplink speed limited to ~50% of my uplink bandwidth. I can still browse the web from the PC running utorrent or one of the others without any problems. All my machines are wired as I had a great deal of trouble with wireless, this was nothing to do with utorrent or any other P2P as I was not using it then.

I do not know about your ISP but most of the UK ones seem to set the uplink bandwidth at just enough to deal with the acknowledges and other message used to maintain the file downloads, https sessions ect. This would mean at the max download you just about max out your upload as well. I think that the utorrent setting for the uplink speed is the net uplink transfer speed, so the messages needed to maintain the file transfers, sessions ect will need to be added to it.

The chances are that the uplink is congested at the router. Its getting requests over wifi, and its dumping them as the outgoing queue is already full, this will cause re-transmission of the dumped request putting even more load on the router.

I would try dropping your uplink speed on utorent first as thats easy and will not cost anything.

I can check my settings for utorrent if you wish.

Rob.

 

[Griffinhart]

You should be able to reduce the number of max connections in your torrent client to 4ish. That should solve the problem. If you are considering a new router take a look at www.smallnetbuilder.com They have some good reviews of routers there.

Heymrdj's recommendation of the DIR-655 is a good one. It's not a cheap router though. I use one myself. It is one of the best consumer routers for handling bit torrent.

 

[geokilla]

I recently got a similar problem as well. When I have BT running, the computer with BT running seems to stop receiving non-torrent packets resulting is very slow web browsing. I didn't get this problem before and I could run around 6 torrent tasks without experiencing any slowdowns. The upload speed is limited to 3KB/s, and Half Open TCP/IP is set to 0 for some reason. I'm currently using a WRT54GSv7 with DD-WRT V24 RC5.

@OP, try using DD-WRT. Don't use the V24 RC6 though since there's many bugs with those.

 

[bigpow]

for the router, there should be some settings to set max connections limit, and timeout timers
set connection limit to max and limit timers to min, that should prevent connection/memory overload

also set your bt clients to limit (read: bt speed guide)

finally, if all fails, the 3rd party firmware should have an option to 'reboot' the router periodically

 

[unpossible]

Thanks for all the input and suggestions guys! If the limiting connections tweak doesn't work, I'll look into the Dlink router.

 

[sidnelson13]

8 connections??? That's insane!
The whole purpose of BT is to connect to as many sources as possible and download little pieces from each, which will then greatly increase your download speed.

I had the same problem the moment I upgraded my router to DD-WRT v24 Micro Edition, since I have a WRT54G v5. I was trying to look for an answer when I stumbled to this thread. Whenever I had more than around 500 connections, the router's CPU would go all the way up to 100% and doing anything else on the router was impossible.
Now, the only solution I found so far was to downgrade DD-WRT to v23 sp2, and wait for a service pack for v24. when it comes, I'll try it again.

Now my WRG54G is back to keeping around 1500 connections without breaking a sweat.
My Azureus is configured to keep 150 connections PER TORRENT, with normally 10 torrents active.
At the same time my roomate also navigates the web, and I stream media to my PS3 through UPnP.
It's not a problem with the number of connections or the router, but it's probably a software problem (firmware)

If you have the original firmware of your router then you're probably screwed in terms of BT performance, but in most of the alternative firmwares, you can change the number of connections allowed by the router. In DD-WRT, this configuration is on the very bottom of the page On "Administration -> Management". That path is valid for DD-WRT v23 sp2, which is the one I using. Not sure about v24.

If you want another router, try always getting one that is supported by DD-WRT.

 

[GregGreen]

I thought I had this problem but it might be different. I had a Buffalo WHR-G54S that would drop connections when a torrent was running (but with only two computers connected). When I switched from DD-WRT (either v22 or v23, I can't remember which it was, but I'm pretty sure it was 23) to tomato-wrt, the problems stopped. Since it's an easy fix, it might be worth trying that.

 

[Modelworks]

I had similar problems.
I have a dlink di-624 that would reset anytime I used torrents.
In the setup menus there is a setting for virtual servers.
In that I added utorrent, the port and clicked enable.

Since doing that the router has never crashed again from torrents.
If your router has something similar that might be worth trying.
If not I highly recommend building a router out of an old pc.
The options and the stability/speed it can give is well worth it.

I use my old pc for routing, firewall, NAS, email server, and even power the cable modem and switch with its power supply.

 

[sidnelson13]

Well, building a router from an old PC doesn't work for for 2 reasons: Wireless and Space.

Installing Tomato is also out of the question, since I own WRT54G v5, which is not supported by Tomato due to the flash memory being too low to hold it.

Well, there's not much to do. DD-WRT v23 sp2 is working. It lacks some features new to v24, but its micro editions seem to be more stable than v24's.