BitComet kills my internet

[rasmusharly]

With my broadband connection I also got a Netgear wireless router CG3000.

It works really fine but usually when I start to download something through BitComet, the entire internet connection shuts down and I must reboot the router and wait around 10 minutes before the connection is back up.

I've got hold of my ISP's technical support several times but they keep coming up with strange excuses. Recent suggestions are that they will send a technician out to see if the cables are in working order. I've tried to explain that it is only when I start the DL's in BitComet and update WoW it happens, but they're pretty thickheaded.

I'm pretty sure that it is just a parameter in the router settings to change, but I don't know which one...

Anyone ideas?

I'm using BC 1.27, win 7 64bit, and theres' no other problems with my connection, except the odd disconnect from wireless, but that's a different issue.

Thanks in advance.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Bittorrent downloading gives your router a lot more to do then normal average internet usage, so it's most likely exposing a weakness in your router.

There are ways to limit the amount of work the router must do, but they may also adversely effect the efficiency of your downloads. I don't have time at the moment to give you a complete technical explanation, but one of our support guys should be by today to help you, or if you want to save some time, I can tell you this has been asked and explained many, many times, and a search in the forum should find everything you need to know.

However, the first thing I would do is see if a firmware update is available for your router. That may address the problem so you don't have to restrict the work it's given to do.

[Vasy]

The quickest way of solving your problem would be to limit the maximum upload speed of bitcomet to about 80% of your maximum tested upload speed in Options/Network. Also, it wold be a good idea to go to the Advanced section and limiting network.max_udp_pkt_per_sec to around 50 or even lower, and the netowork.max_connections to about 600 or lower. You can play with those options until you find the failproof values.

The harder way would be to also log in to your router, look for QoS(quality of service) and prioritize the traffic you want(like ACK TCP packets). If you wish to take this step you should first google for tutorials in this field, it shouldn't be hard once you get the base idea..

[kluelos]

Limiting the upload speed is necessary to maximize your speed and prevent interference with other applications, but will probably not help with your shutdown issue.

This is basically a fault with the router. Bittorrent makes many, many more connections that other protocols, and badly-designed routers can't handle that number of connections. It's because they're "smart" and try to "help" by memorizing connections, on the false assumption that any connection you've used once will probably be used again soon. Definitely not true with bittorrent. A simple, "dumb" router has no problem with it.

The very poorly-designed smart ones simply shut down -- a really graceless way to fail.

You probably don't have a choice about the equipment, given that this is an ISP model, so I assume your ISP provided it/forced you to buy it. You may or may not have the option to substitute your own cable gateway for theirs (2Wire is good), but if you don't want to do that, I think you have two options.

One is to keep after your ISP, let them know that support for bittorrent is not optional and not discretionary -- they MUST support it or you will go elsewhere, so they need to fix the problems that the gateway has with Bittorrent, up to and including replacing the gateway with a different model or make, if that's what it takes, if they want to keep your business. And Bittorrent or no bittorrent, you certainly have the right to expect their equipment not to shut itself down during normal use, which this is

The other is to start shutting off features of the gateway, one by one, via its control interface, until you can find a feature that is causing this problem. That approach makes several assumptions that might not be true, of course.