Torrenting Makes Internet Crap

[CaseyBlackburn]

Whenever I have uTorrent going I pretty much can't make any new connections. I have uTorrent setup to allow a max of 500 connections to try to help and it still doesn't make a difference. This happens when I only have 50kb/s or less of torrents going through my 6x6 connection.

When that screenshot was taken I couldn't even pull up a webpage.
What's also weird is that if I close uTorrent my active states go down to 150. Either way 1,800 states is far from 20,000.

Anyone got any suggestions? Sorry if this is the wrong place, I was in a struggle between here and Firewalling. I figured it seems to be more of a generic thing then the FW.

[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.