Bit torrents killing my internet?
 

For a while now, I've been wondering why my internet connection keeps dropping off for seemingly no reason, and I've come to the conclusion that somehow, bittorrent is the culprit. I don't know why, but my connection just quits working after a random amount of time, and without any messages from Windows about there being something wrong with the connection.

Anybody know about this, like how to fix it, or does this have more to do with my ISP?

emule and bittorrent do that to me too, I suspect it's because they're using all of your bandwidth. Make sure your download and upload speed are capped to values that still allow you to use your connection for other things.

this used to happen to me all the time and it didn't get completely fixed until we got a new modem. our modem would stop receiving the internet and we'd have to reset it.

What Kahl described is pretty much my situation. It's happened before, though, and I don't think getting a new modem fixed the problem, or if it did, it was only for a little while.

I'm using Bittornado, and it has an option to cap download speeds, but none for uploads.

it does, just not in the regular config area- you have to go advanced or somesuch

at least that's how the version i'm using works

it's the weirdest thing, this problem, because I fucking tried EVERYTHING to fix it. Then one day all of a sudden it stopped doing that.

the only other thing i can think of is that if you have a computer connected by USB you might want to change that to ethernet :O I say that because it's one of the only other things besides a modem that changed... oh.. and you could try getting a router.
I think we might've had a router though when it was doing all of that ;/

How are you connecting to the net? Because BitTorrent doesn't always play nicely with Linksys wireless routers.

They keep a record of connected IP addresses (for some reason) so if you're connecting to a lot of seeds and/or peers it can often cause your router to crash and your connection to drop.

You could also try switching to uTorrent (or a few other clients which support it) and enabling protocol encryption. Some ISPs cap your bandwidth if they detect you're sending/recieving a lot of P2P traffic. I doubt they would intentionally drop your connection but it's worth looking at.

If it has to do with Linksys routers, that could be it. I connect via a Linksys wireless router, though my computer is physically connected to it. The other computer in the apartment goes to it via a wireless card. I sometimes get messages about there being an IP conflict between the two computers, something about them sharing the same IP, or something like that.

Copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G :

"As shipped, the Linksys firmware crashes under heavy peer-to-peer network traffic, such as BitTorrent. The reason for this crash is that Linux'sconnection tracking by default keeps track of old connections for five days. This five day limit quickly overwhelms the router when there are a high number of network connections, such as with BitTorrent, and can only be resolved by power cycling the router. For a detailed tutorial on how to permanently fix this issue on a pre-v5 router see the uTorrent FAQ[15]. Briefly, it involves installing a 3rd party firmware.
Earlier versions of the Linksys firmware (<4.50.00) have a bug that causes interaction problems between players in World of Warcraft.[16][17]
Some unconfirmed reports have also been made that users cannot use VPN, specifically PPTP connections, through the new version 5 router.[citation needed][citation needed] The best guess is that the router does not support protocol 47 (GRE) even though Linksys claims VPN pass-through support on the box.
The v6 firmware revision 1.01.0 introduced a problem where the QoS page requires a valid manual upstream bandwidth value even if the upstream bandwidth is set to Auto. [18]"



Try updating your firmware and stopping (not pausing) torrents which are queued or finished.

It also depends upon the Bittorent client you're using; some are bigger bandwidth whores than others, and many do have options to cap download speeds as was said before. You might want to try switching to something that eats less bandwidth, and maybe a little less memory at the same time. I've gotten an older machine to crash before just by running Azureus.

EDIT:

OK, I believe I just made myself look like an idiot. I looked up a few clients (Bittornado, Azureus, and one other) and the base bandwidth usage isn't too different between the programs. Not enough to make a significant difference, at any rate. Though you can make it use less bandwidth if you don't seed while you're downloading something else.

Nothing to do with your bandwidth. It's the size of the routing table like Wikipedia says.

My router's a BEFW11S4, but still, if upgrading the firmware will fix the problem, I'm willing to try it.

I found a firmware update for it, but unfortunately, it only gave my the .bin file, and all their instructions involve using some executable that's supposed to be included in a zip with the .bin.

Is there a general way of upgrading firmware that somebody knows about?