Internet connection "goes stale"
 

So my downstairs neighbor who pays for internet lets me leech off of his connection. He's totally cool with it as he offered me the opportunity. It works fine except for when I try to use torrents. Within a short (variable) time after starting up microtorrent the connection just "dries up." It's like someone just pulls the plug. I can't do anything to re-establish the connection except for restarting my laptop. What can I do to correct this?

Not possibly subjecting this kind neighbor to a lawsuit would probably be your best bet.

It sounds like your torrenting is causing the router to hard lock. Depending on how much HP his router has (CPU,RAM) you might simply be overloading it with the traffic. utorrent and most P2P apps open a lot of concurrent connections. When I use Utorrent I ususally have 100+ connections open simultaneously.

You can try all the basics such as making sure WPA2 AES is the encryption method being used, making sure he has the latest firmware on his router, or a router replacement might be in order.

I hope you use a fully configured Peerblock! It's for your protection, and the owners. Even if you're dling legal stuff, the moment you open a udp port your ip will be slammed by anti-p2p scanners.

I have never had that issue with any router I've had, even when I was on 100mb/s and had those old/crappy ones. And I've downloaded tons of Linux distros.

EDIT; Didn't know about PeerBlock, thanks!

If your neighbor is on a(n) (A)DSL, there might be no easy fix. In some cases, this type of connection fares rather poorly when subjected to a large number of simultaneous connections.

Other than that, it could be the router's fault, depending on the model, type of wifi connection you use, any and all QoS rules in place, etc.

High end routers don't have that issue ;)

Torrent traffic get's bandwidth managed by a lot of ISP's ever thought that could be the issue? really surprised no one has mentioned this :wtf:

Comcast supposedly throttles for torrent traffic....I've never experienced it.

force encryption, use a proxy too if needed.

Lemme guess, microTorrent 3.#? Get 2.#. I'm 99% 3.# throttles itself. I got crappy speeds using it when downloading the HIB. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it completely stops downloading if you didn't upload enough.

Thanks for all of the replies. I'll try a few of these suggestions a bit later to see what works. To respond to what a few people said:

He just recently got a new router, so I don't know what kind it is now. The last one I looked at I believe it was type n, but still I think this one is brand new.

He's on Cox cable, not ADSL.

I am (was) using utorrent 3, but I had the upload set to a pretty generous size based upon Cox's bandwidth. I'll change to 2.

reduce the amount of connections you use.


ignore everything people tell you, and set it to about 20 connections maximum, lock the upload speed to about 5KB/s and under advanced change net.max.halfopen to about 40.


they'll be slower, but they wont hog or lag a connection.

+1: I would keep it legal when using your neighbors internet. If you really want to go using torrents (not to say there aren't legal torrents, just most people don't use it for that,) you really should man up and get your own internet because he is liable if anything happens. What a nice neighbor but I bet you he would be less nice if he knew what you were doing.

I wouldn't be dumb enough to download anything that would put him at risk.

Then you shouldn't have a problem because almost all legal downloads use torrents as an alternative and not as the only means to get the content that you're downloading.

My Amped Wireless has blocking stuff for this kinda thing too.....

I tried all of the suggestions, but nothing worked.

Must be fun to (think that you) know everything huh?

A lot of the older G routers (and some cheep N routers) had issues with the traffic from torrents. Its the table that gets full from all the connections and does not renew its self often enough. Newer N routers do not have this issue.

Suggestion: Buy or loan him a good N router sense your getting a connection for free.

To see if this is the problem have him reboot the router by pulling the power for a sec. If it speeds back up its the router

Another thought, maybe your neighbor is throttling you? Or just taking all the bandwith

Don't be a smart ass. :slap:

Well, did you even try checking to see if there are an alternative download? You didn't answer my comment and only responded with a witty retort. What about telling us what you're trying to download because I bet you that there is an alternative to using a torrent, assuming what you're downloading is legal which you've claimed that it is. So how about you find out if that is the case so you can actually download what you're trying to get while you try to figure out why the torrents are acting up instead of not having what you're trying to get at all?

Two examples are WoW and Ubuntu. WoW uses torrents as the primary means to push out new content and updates but it doesn't limit you to it (you can disable p2p,) and with Ubuntu, torrents are the alternative method to download. I'm just saying that I've yet to see a legal torrent be the only means for getting something because not everyone's hardware plays nicely with torrents (as you've figured out.)

Maybe you could purchase your own internet and stop mooching off your neighbor?:laugh:

...or that. I mean, I can't really justify complaining when I use someone else's internet. Even more so when everything works fine other than torrents (does it? I'm assuming everything else works fine).

If you must torrent, I haven't seen this mentioned so here goes.MANY people Don't notice it, Be sure Your Hard Drive is keeping up with the writing of the torrent file. Sometimes it will display as "hard drive full" or the like. Effectively , It will appear that you have No internet speed in the torrent client, but all that is needed is a faster hdd, or a separate hdd.Running torrent client on secondary Hdd works well. Also Many ISP's DO throttle as mentioned earlier.

If it is hard drive speed, Mussel's recommendation would solve it because that happens when you have a ton of connections open and there are a ton of random reads and writes. Limiting the number of connections essentially makes this a non-issue if you're drive isn't close to full.

@Hotobu

Why don't you try the excellent and reliable uTorrent client along with the settings that Mussels suggested? Can't hurt. :)

http://www.utorrent.com