Torrents crippling other internet activities - router to blame?

Participant · 13 Jun 2010 at 10:35

Hi all

We have a five year old Belkin cable router on our Virgin 20Mb connection.

I'm using uTorrent and it's always been the case that, when downloading torrents, even if the transfer speeds are slow, browsing and any other internet usage is impossible with pages frequently failing to load entirely and Outlook failing its send / receive operations. If however I'm maxing a FTP connection to a website, browsing remains perfectly good.

I assume then that this is down to the manner in which torrent traffic bombards my network. I've tried reducing max connections to 100 in uTorrent and this helps somewhat, but I still get pages failing to load or loading VERY slowly.

- Would a new router solve this problem?
- If so, what should I go for (must be wireless)? I have a max of £100 to spend, but since it's a relatively simple home network, if I could get away with spending less I will.

Thanks a bunch.

P.S. In before 'torrents are for noobs'

.

dave-lew99 · 13 Jun 2010 at 10:42

Er... stop torrenting?

(Mostly) Anything available legitimately from torrents will be available for HTTP download and on a 20mb connection this is going to be faster anyway.

Could either be your router, but also likely to be your ISP throttling the hell out of you as soon as they see torrent traffic.

C64 · 13 Jun 2010 at 10:45

uploading is what throttles the connection find the point where the upload speed throttles the down.
I'd suggest no more than 30k second upload on 768k.

Pulse · 13 Jun 2010 at 10:51

I know that our absolutely shocking sky router has a problem dealing with the number of connections that torrents require, when my dad was torrenting. I've tested it before with the upload crippling our connection but it made no difference even if he turned uploading completely off. But if I limited the number of connections to the torrents to about 10 it worked fine. He then complained it was slow and took of the limits and slowed down all my online games so just blocked all of his ports on the router ^_^

Participant · 13 Jun 2010 at 10:59

dave-lew99 said:
Er... stop torrenting?

(Mostly) Anything available legitimately from torrents will be available for HTTP download and on a 20mb connection this is going to be faster anyway.

Er...no?

Torrents are a great way to get a wide variety of resources from the same place. This thread is not about the merits and demerits of torrents.

dave-lew99 said:
Could either be your router, but also likely to be your ISP throttling the hell out of you as soon as they see torrent traffic.

No, it's extremely unlikely to be that, since my torrent speeds max out my connection.

C64 said:
uploading is what throttles the connection find the point where the upload speed throttles the down.
I'd suggest no more than 30k second upload on 768k.

'30k second upload'? What do you mean? And why are you referring to 768k when my connection is 20Mb as stated above?

Pulse said:
I know that our absolutely shocking sky router has a problem dealing with the number of connections that torrents require, when my dad was torrenting. I've tested it before with the upload crippling our connection but it made no difference even if he turned uploading completely off. But if I limited the number of connections to the torrents to about 10 it worked fine. He then complained it was slow and took of the limits and slowed down all my online games so just blocked all of his ports on the router ^_^

How do you know it's the router though? This is what I am trying to make sure of before buying a new one.

Destination · 13 Jun 2010 at 11:07

Robbie G said:
'30k second upload'? What do you mean? And why are you referring to 768k when my connection is 20Mb as stated above?

He's talking about your upload, you can either DL or UL, and when your upload is running at full pace, your Dl will suffer.

Thats why he quoted the correct figure he mentioned, and why your connection may be stalling.

Zarf · 13 Jun 2010 at 11:14

Robbie G said:
C64 said:

uploading is what throttles the connection find the point where the upload speed throttles the down.
I'd suggest no more than 30k second upload on 768k.

Click to expand...

'30k second upload'? What do you mean? And why are you referring to 768k when my connection is 20Mb as stated above?

This is what you need to do if you want a usable net connection. Your 20Mb connection is asymmetrical - the upload is a lot lower than the download, probably just 768Kb/s. All home connections are asymmetrical, this won't change until Fibre to the Home is rolled out.
When uploads aren't restricted and there's no decent QOS in place, your connection becomes pretty unusable because your browser/email client/whatever has trouble getting through to request the data from the servers (more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it)

In your torrent client there will be an option to limit upload, if you're using uTorrent this is under Options->Preferences->Bandwidth. On a 768kb/s connection you can support a maximum of 96KB/s. If you limit the maximum amount that uTorrent uploads to half or a third of this capability you should have a much better net experience.

Participant · 13 Jun 2010 at 11:20

I see. Upload was set to 50KB/s. I have now set it to 5! Let's see what happens.

Azuse05 · 13 Jun 2010 at 11:25

If you're using a 5 year old router it was probably never built to handle that sort of load, but most consumer routers have firmware defaults that have huge connection time-outs resulting in the routers ram being clogged up (Linksys/Dlink are particularly guilty).

Two options. One, pay a fiver a month for a vpn service. That way the router only has to handle a single connection, with the real load spread between your pc and the vpn provider. It also means you can really crank the number of connections up far higher than any home router.

Two, replace your ageing router which at 5 years, is probably past it's best. A Netgear WNR3500L is well under £100 and runs tomato (http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=63587) which will fix both your lag and connection issues.

Participant · 13 Jun 2010 at 11:35

Ok well 100 connections and upload limit of 1KB/s still resulted in slow loading and partially loaded web pages, so it looks like it's new router time. Will take a look at the WNR3500L.

Thanks all.

Participant · 13 Jun 2010 at 11:45

One other thing...could it be my Virgin Media cable modem at fault here, or is that unlikely? Don't really want to spend £100 to have the same problem.

Our cable modem was replaced with a new one about 6 months ago when we upgraded out service.

Zarf · 13 Jun 2010 at 13:12

Robbie G said:
One other thing...could it be my Virgin Media cable modem at fault here, or is that unlikely? Don't really want to spend £100 to have the same problem.

Our cable modem was replaced with a new one about 6 months ago when we upgraded out service.

If you can get the full 20Mb/s on normal downloads, the modem is fine. If uTorrent is limited (and I wouldn't limit it quite as much as you have, or your torrent downloads themselves will slow). It's definitely sounding like your router is poor at coping with multiple connections.

You could always test this by enabling your windows firewall and then connecting your pc directly to the modem.

KIA · 13 Jun 2010 at 13:43

Get the WRT54GL and stick Tomato on it.

Dazza_Random · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:16

fluff said:
Get the WRT54GL and stick Tomato on it.

Yup it will handle 4,000 connection easily with no slow down

Participant · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:16

Cheers guys. Good idea Zarf about connecting directly to the modem. That will tell me for sure whether or not the torrents are the problem.

Azuse05 · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:36

A 54gl will not handle 4k without slowdown (not with qos), it's not that simple. The 54gl is a 5 year old router like the ops (they stopped making them more than a year ago) and is thus hardware limited.

The reason tomato has a 4k limit by default is because it's time-outs are far lower than linksys defaults an thus, in theory, it should be possible. Unfortunately it only has a 200mhz cpu and 16mb or ram and qos eats up a lot of cpu. Once the cpu displayed in tomato reach ~ 0.6/7 things become sluggish, not necessarily slow but things will take a few seconds to load. When this happens depends on the line, in my case at 13meg my 54gl hit that point around 550-600 connections and mine's over-clocked to 250mhz. Then again if you don't use qos and turn it off the router is capable of handling a 50meg line.

If you wouldn't use qos (and frankly you'd be missing most of tomato's point) then a 54gl would be the cheapest option however replacing a 5 year old router with a 5 years old router is simply going to mean it'll need replaced sooner rather than later.

xrs · 13 Jun 2010 at 20:31

I have experienced this problem on several different makes of router. Typically the computer most affected is the computer that is using utorrent. I am not sure what the problem is, it seems quite random too.

wesley · 13 Jun 2010 at 21:23

i had EXACTLY same problem as yours, the problem is.........not joking.......utorrent

i spent hours and hours with settings and never got it working properly. utorrent is well known for affecting another internet activities when utorrent is used on the network. check utorrent forums.

so i switched to another torrent client called bit torrent which got same GUI as utorrent. problem went away straight away. no idea why. so been using bit torrent since then

http://www.bittorrent.com/

some people dont have problem with utorrent, some people are just lucky

am using linksys WRT54GL with tomato firmware on 50MB virgin cable.

Venares · 13 Jun 2010 at 22:25

The problem as Azuse said, is the sheer amount of connections that torrents require and you pants Belkin just cant handle it.
I have a WRT54GL at the moment and its a great little router but unfortunatly its now showing its age.
When I was on 20mb everything was great, but now I've moved to 50mb its choaking and simply cant keep up anymore.
If you dont ever plan to move to 50mb the 54GL is a solid choise, otherwise you want to look at the ASUS RT-N16 or the Netgear WNR3500L.

Rroff · 14 Jun 2010 at 00:05

The problem is connection cycling, while the number of active connections and upload/download speeds can make this worse they aren't the main culprits of the issues other people have with web browsing, etc. when a torrent is active.

Essentially the router (and this is common with most routers) can't keep up with the number of connections being established and dropped on any reasonably seeded torrent and you tie up a large part of the connection table with connections awaiting timeout - a common bug is connections stalled in FIN_WAIT_* states which might take upto 10 minutes to clear or never even clear until the router is reset. So other people trying to use the internet are fighting for connections. Limiting the number of active connections in the torrent client won't help this, just slow down how long it takes for it to become a problem.

The problem with this is you can never be sure how well a router will work until you test it, those based on unix OS especially can be quite susceptible to issues with FIN_WAIT states and memory management.