Torrenting Makes Internet Crap

CaseyBlackburn

I looked in the logs and saw entries like this one:
miniupnpd[54396]: sendto(udp_notify=14, 10.11.0.1): No buffer space available

So I disabled the upnp service, and I'm still having issues. No more log entries though.

eirikz

Do you have your modem in bridgemode or is it acting as a router.

In my experience with the shoddy ADSL-modems in norway if you don't bridge your modem (which basically means it actually does the routing) the modem will turn into a slowrunning pool of ooze, and\or reboot.

CaseyBlackburn

My pfSense box is plugged into my University's network. So it's all higher quality gear than just consumer modems.

tommyboy180

So your pfsense box is not the border device, your university's is. Do you have the same issues when you download torrents without pfsense in the picture?
My suspicion is that your university is using some sort of throttling, which is common on university networks.

jimp

I'd also check for network card or cabling issues.

And do you get similar limits in downloading when you are not using torrents?

CaseyBlackburn

@tommyboy180 I don't have the issue when pfsense isn't being used. They do throttle Bittorrent traffic, but they throttle it at 200Kbit/s.

@jimp I only have the issue when using torrents. Web/FTP/SSH/Etc all work at full capacity.

Have any of you guys heard of it being possibly that having a few bad sections of ram can cause issues with the state table? I don't think my RAM is bad, but I haven't got to check it. I was thinking that maybe when torrenting makes the state table large it then is storing states in bad sections of memory.

jimp

I haven't heard of that myself…

But if they throttle at 200Kbit/s that is in line with the numbers you posted in the original screenshot. That doesn't explain why other web pages are not accessible though.

eirikz

Couldn't there be a connectionlimit on the university side too ?

tommyboy180

That would make sense if they limit the amount of concurrent connections. Your client would exhaust those resources fast.
Limit your client to 50 connections. See what happens from there.

Ball

uTorrent has become really chatty due to its µTP algorithm. It floods routers with tiny UDP packets instead of most torrent clients which let TCP handle everything (which usually use the full 1500 bytes).

I don't know if that's relevant, but you could try a client which doesn't support µTP and see what happens.