I am running into the following problem. Whenever I try to download a torrent that has a large number of individual files (like for example, the Mame 0.139 ROMs torrent), then Bitcomet freezes up and stops responding. The torrent consists of roughly 8700 individual files, ranging in size from a few bytes to a few megabytes (with few larger exceptions). I have to manually kill BitComet, and then remove the torrent and files, before Bitcomet will behave as normal again. Simply killing and starting BitComet is not enough - the torrent and files must be deleted. Im using BitComet 1.22 on Windows Vista SP2.
Please explain, in considerable detail, exactly what you mean by this?
Repeatedly starting bitcomet, hoping it doesnt freeze immediately (if it does, kill it and restart), and sometimes you just have enough time to right click the torrent and select ‘delete task and downloaded files’. That solves the problem.
PS:
I could have sworn that I posted this in the ‘bugs’ forum, was it moved by someone or did I just not pay enough attention when I posted ?
PM me with the link to the .torrent file. I’ll post it in the staff section for the staff member to access.
I’d like to try it myself and see if I can reproduce the behavior you mention.
Thanks - and please let me know if you are or aren’t able to reproduce the behaviour. It would really ease my mind if this is reproducible by others, but even if it isn’t that may be a good starting point to determine differences in setup that might explain things.
I can’t reproduce the behavior you describe. I’ve downloaded and started downloading the torrent on two laptops:
one using Win XP SP3;
one using Windows 7 Home Edition.
On both, it downloaded and started running just fine. Granted there were a few seconds of delay, since the .torrent file is quite big (about 0.5 MB) and it takes a little longer to parse it.
But nothing other than that.
When does this problem occur?
When you download a torrent to create a task, there are some steps involved.
Your browser downloads the .torrent file.
Whether it’s set it will open the .torrent file or if not it will present you with a choice to open or save the file; or you can open it manually (it doesn’t really matter). The idea is to open it somehow.
The task properties dialog appears.
After you hit the “Download Now” or “Download Later” button the task is created (it appears in the Task List) and depending on your previous choice it starts running or not.
Wiz, I see that you have already tried it out, and was wondering if (perhaps) the poster was having problems because the very last file does not show any size (it juts says “bytes”, but doesn’t mention how many)… or is this just completely irrelevant (which, by the looks of it, it is)?
Crap. That must mean there’s something funny going on with my system/configuration…
When you download a torrent to create a task, there are some steps involved.
Your browser downloads the .torrent file.
Whether it’s set it will open the .torrent file or if not it will present you with a choice to open or save the file; or you can open it manually (it doesn’t really matter). The idea is to open it somehow.
The task properties dialog appears.
After you hit the “Download Now” or “Download Later” button the task is created (it appears in the Task List) and depending on your previous choice it starts running or not.
How far do you get on that scale?
All the way to ‘4’. But after (or perhaps during ?) the creation of the task, BitComet freezes up on me.
I don’t know cassie. I didn’t even notice that; as soon as I saw that the task was created and it started downloading on both laptops I deleted it.
But if it would have been something wrong in the .torrent file itself, I guess the task wouldn’t be created and started. If a file is perhaps 0 bytes in size (I’m just assuming since I don’t have the torrent running now) that still shouldn’t hinder the task in any way, by my reckoning.
L.E. I’ve just checked and on my copy of BitComet the last file of the torrent appears to be (as ordered by default in the file list) “ReadMe.txt” with a displayed size of 572B (bytes).
BitComet keeps its tasks in an xml file named “downloads.xml”, which should be in the %appdata% folder. If it’s not there, then it’s in the program folder, but beware of Virtual Storage.
Since it’s an .xml file you can edit it with Notepad. Back it up before you touch it.
Now knowing that, you can rename, move, edit that file in order to assure that you can start BitComet without hanging the system or having to play finger games to stop tasks quickly enough. Set BC not to start at boot while you’re workign through this, to prevent getting hung up.
My first suspicion is that you’ve loaded a torrent which is so large that areas of memory which don’t usually get exercised, are finally being used – and dying. This one is, fortunately, easy to test. Download the current version of memtest86 from memtest.org. It’s free. You’ll need to make a bootable medium one way or another – burn a CD, write a portable drive, format a floppy. Anyway, boot it, go away and let it run for a couple of hours. Memtest is good, if it says you have problems then you really do.
If you’re having memory issues, the nothing anyone else says about anything is going to be reliable on your system. It’s also something you can do right now, so why not get it out of the way, one way or the other?
Checking your hardware (e.g. you memory, as kluelos advised you) it’s always a good thing to do when dealing with this sort of errors.
If that turns out nothing, the first thing I would do, if I were you, would be to backup my Task List and the \torrents folder, then uninstall BitComet and make sure any trace of it is gone from the:
Program Files folder;
AppData\Local\VirtualStore folder:
or AppData\Roaming folder;
Windows Registry (BitComet doesn’t use registry entries for storing its settings but it uses some for storing plugins settings, shell entries and file associations).
After that, reinstall BitComet but don’t import the TaskList just yet. Just open the .torrent file which gives you trouble to see how it behaves on a clean installation of BitComet.
If it works well, then you can try re-copying the \torrents folder back and importing the Task List.
If it still doesn’t work on your machine, try opening it on another Vista machine which uses the same BitComet version as yours (You can download a “green” version which doesn’t use an installer, on that machine, if it doesn’t have your version installed).
The idea is to narrow down the list of possible causes with every step you take. It doesn’t sound to appealing, I know, but if you wish to get to the bottom of this you’ll have to start somewhere.
Oh, don’t mind me, Wiz… I tried to start the same torrent but was quickly reminded that I didn’t have enough room for the download on my HDD (sorry… I forgot to mention that).
I meant the one shown right on the index site, here…
Are you doing anything to the files before the download freezes or reaches 100%?
1.)
Yeah, I have enough free disk space to contain the fully downloaded files in the torrent.
2.)
No, im not touching the files myself. The only thing that I can think of that could be messing with the files is my viruscanner, but I disabled that and it didnt make the problem go away.
… Download the current version of memtest86 from memtest.org. It’s free. You’ll need to make a bootable medium one way or another – burn a CD, write a portable drive, format a floppy. Anyway, boot it, go away and let it run for a couple of hours…
I ran memtest86+, as suggested, and it reported no errors.
You can back up the Task List by going to File–>Import and Export Download List menu.
Or you can simply copy the downloads.xml file. It will be located in the \BitComet folder along with the \torrents subfolder, in one of the other two locations I’ve mentioned in my previous post (make sure you make a copy of the \torrents folder too, no matter what method you use to backup the tasklist as you’ll need the .torrent files to restore your current downloads).
That file list on the site is both inaccurate and incomplete, cassie. The next file after hanmai.zip is not *han *but hanamomb.zip (furthermore, there isn’t such a file named “han” in the whole torrent) and the total number of files in the torrent is 8745, not just 3095 as shown on the site.
I don’t know if the number of files and their file-names is automatically being retrieved by a script or manually done, but either way it looks that something/somebody just got bored and stopped mid-way.
On this matters, the info shown by the client has the last word since it’s being read from the actual .torrent file for that torrent.
