Torrents kill my internet?

[jtwhite]

Well, anytime I seed any torrent, like right now I'm helping seed the Ubuntu torrents, it kills my Internet, completely. Nothing will work except the torrent. DNS dies and everything. It will not resolve any host, connect to any IP, or even load my router control panel, from any computer.

Does anybody have any clue why that is? I have a 10megabit/s connection and usually let 1/3 of that go to seeding, so it's not that the torrent is taking all the bandwidth?

[natrobius]

What torrent client are you using? Are you on Windows or linux or mac? Need details.

[jtwhite]

It occurs on both of my computers.

On Linux I use Deluge, on Windows I use uTorrent. Both clients create the problem.

[ah-blabla]

Some ISPs block or slow down torrents, but you say your torrent still works, but nothing else does, so I don't know if the two are related. Or maybe they disable everything but the torrent to make it seem to you as if the torrent is breaking your internet connection, in the attempt to stop you using torrent... (Sounds like it's not your pc that causes the problem since OS doesn't change a thing.) Try experimenting wit settings, but I don't know whether you can do much. (Write a support email to your ISP possibly, but they will probably assume torrent=illegal etc, which in your case it isn't, but in their view is, so I don't know if that's a good idea.)

[steronius]

reduce the used bandwidth, especially upload.

[jtwhite]

I'm thinking it could be the amount of incoming and outgoing pings and stuff? Having so many users connected at once?

[ah-blabla]

I'm thinking it could be the amount of incoming and outgoing pings and stuff? Having so many users connected at once?

Not necessarily pings, but the number of connections could be the problem. Try reducing the number of connections to say 5, see what happens, then increase slowly if that fixes the problem.

Edit: Livewire made a good point below: you may be setting upload to above what your connections upload speed is, since your upload speed is usually much smaller than download.

[Livewire]

The only thing I've seen cause a problem with my 10meg service is my upload is more like 1meg, and if I let it get to that (roughly 100KB/sec) it kills my network the same as yours does - ping times for everything -but- the torrent spikes upwards of 999ms (assuming it connects or gets a reply at all).

All I can think is somehow it's maxing out what your network can handle for upload, but you said you give it 1/3 of that. Might wanna run a speed-test and make sure you're setting it to 1/3 of the upload, and not setting it to 300KB/sec, which might be more than the maximum upload your network can do. If you've already done that, ignore this entire post; it's just my own experiences recommending you might wanna see what the max upload is, if you haven't already

[achilleasgr]

I agree, this issue seems to be caused by too high upload speeds.
This is what happens every time I set upload to max in a torrent client.
Try setting the upload speed only for ten minutes to very low speeds (for example, arround 10KB) and see if the problem continues.

If that is the problem, I would recommend Vuze, which is an advanced multi-platform torrent client that handles upload speeds (reducing and increasing) completely automatically and transparently.

[Smith6612]

With torrents, you either have way too many connections for your equipment to handle or you've got the upload running full speed. I've been seeding the Ubuntu torrents for a few days now and the Internet here works fine. Typically, when seeding torrents you should seed at 85% of your upload and you need to know how many connections your router can take (many of the more expensive ones can take a couple hundred. Others are bottle necked below 100 and will show NAT errors).

Here, the NAT table on my Linux router is massive due to the way I've set it up as well as how much RAM it has available to it. That's out of the question. My bottleneck is my upload, which is 1.5Mbps (180KB/s). I have my torrent client set to use full speed of upload, however whenever my router sees Internet activity here, it will throttle the speeds for the torrents down a bit. Other times, I will slow it down to use 1.3Mbps of upload, leaving me with 200kbps which will keep latency normal and allow me to not notice a thing.

But really, disable UPnP and logging on your router and that should free up some CPU/memory on it if that's the case. Also, if you're running uTorrent and you're manually port forwarding, run it with the following settings.

Under connections: Disable UPnP Port mapping and NAT-PMP port mapping.
Under Bandwidth, set the upload rate to always be 85% of your total upload in Kilobytes. Set download speed to unlimited (you can set this individually per torrent). Set number of connections globally to whatever your router can deal with, number of connected peers per torrent to whatever gives you the best speeds vs. performance, and upload slots per torrent to 4. Uncheck use Additional upload slots unless upload speed is low.
Under BitTorrent, enable Encryption, do not force it.