Miro hates us.

May 28, 2009 9:05 AM

Why is Miro killing my internet?

So, my girlfriend and I follow a bunch of shows but have weird schedules at our job and often miss them. I also watch a lot of Revision3 content. We LOVE Miro, it's a wonderful video aggregator, but ever since we updated to the 2.0 release a couple months ago, we've had some significant issues.

Miro KILLS our internet connection. Kills it dead. With fire. But only at home. Normally we can both have a bunch of torrents running, be browsing the internet, and I can be on Xbox Live and the internet flows smoothly. As soon as one of us opens Miro, even if it isn't actually downloading anything, the internet chugs to a stop. A dead stop. The kicker? This only happens at home. At work, it's fine. At her mom's house, it's fine. While I was waiting for an oil change the other day and connected to a Staples Hotspot, it was fine. But not at home.

I run OSX and she runs Windows 7 RC1. I've tried resetting our router to factory settings, but nothing seems to work. Could this indicate a bad router? Bad firmware? I would put on Tomato, but we seem to have bought the only Linksys router that doesn't support third-party firmware. What could be doing this?!

I'm at my wit's end, here, MeFi. Please, god, help me.

posted by InsanePenguin to computers & internet (14 comments total)

My guess is that it's opening a whole slew of ports all at once when you open it, which is known to kill certain broadband modems. See if Miro has a setting to open less ports at startup.
posted by mcstayinskool at 9:16 AM on May 28

Just checked. Currently, it opens ports between 8500 and 8700. I'm technically inclined, but not network-ly inclined. I can't look at my girlfriend's laptop at the moment to see if that's the default, but I imagine it is since I don't remember ever changing anything. What sort of range should I be opening? I don't want to significantly impact the speed of the downloads, either.
posted by InsanePenguin at 9:21 AM on May 28

Please explain "dead stop". Is it slow or actually dead? Is the application that you're blaimng working or not? Does it recover magically after stopping said application or do you have to restart something?
posted by themel at 9:28 AM on May 28

Dead stop means dead stop. Everything fails to resolve anything. Xbox Live will cut out, torrents stop working, webpages will fail to load. Miro will work just fine. Everything will recover but it takes a couple minutes, sometimes I just get frustrated and restart the router instead.
posted by InsanePenguin at 9:47 AM on May 28

Miro includes a bittorrent client, right? So then if it isn't downloading, it may still be uploading stuff you've downloaded. They way people usually deal with this is to limit the upload rate to something less than your internet connection is capable off. Limiting the total number of connections it makes is probably a good thing to do while you are at it.
posted by Good Brain at 9:50 AM on May 28

Have you adjusted the QoS settings of your router? It sounds like it's dedicating 100% of available bandwidth to Miro and/or its ports.
posted by JuiceBoxHero at 9:57 AM on May 28

Good Brain, it does include a bittorrent client, but I'm religious about stopping it seeding, and I have the uploading capped well under our connection's capability. I can run Transmission (my BT client) and have it seeding well into the 2-3Mbit range with no ill effects.

JuiceBox, I played with the QoS once because my Xbox Live was being wonky, but nothing shows up in the router setup when I went to check it. I don't see any option to clear all QoS settings in any case, but I can't imagine they'd be invisible and only resettable by resetting the whole router.
posted by InsanePenguin at 10:04 AM on May 28

What router do you have?
posted by agentmunroe at 11:26 AM on May 28

Linksys WRT54G
posted by InsanePenguin at 11:30 AM on May 28

Who is your ISP? some ISP supplied modems are known to have a max number of open connections that will cause a good 10-15 minute stall if it is exceed. Basically, a firmware-limited way to kill a noisy torrent hub. You're not running into this at your parents or work because of 3 possible reasons: at work, they have a better network able to handle this. At parents they don't have enough other stuff on the network to cause the issue, or they're on a different ISP with a better modem.
posted by jrishel at 12:01 PM on May 28

what version of the Linksys WRT54G? (there should be a version number on the back near the serial number) because most version of the WRT54G are supported by dd-wrt, if not tomato.
posted by jrishel at 12:03 PM on May 28

Maybe your ISP is blocking torrents by turning off your internet connection. If you're really brave try disconnecting your your router and connecting one of your computers directly to the cable/DSL/whatever modem with an ethernet cable, then opening Miro.
posted by 6550 at 12:19 PM on May 28

I have Comcast, whom I know is notorious for throttling torrents, but my actual torrent application runs absolutely fine, is running much, much more often than Miro, and using more bandwidth than Miro on average.

jrishel, I don't recall at the moment what version the router is, but trust me, I was broken-hearted when I discovered that my version didn't support tomato or dd-wrt. I'm at work now so I can't look anyhow. My work connection and my parents' connection are actually lower than mine at home. It's a small business and we don't actually use the internet for much.

I can understand how you might say that having too much running at one time stalls the network, but even if it's just Miro and my browser it still happens.

6550, I'll try that when I get home.

Could anyone answer the other question I had that mcstayinskool asked? Miro opens ports 8500-8700. Should I try reducing that range, and if I do, will it have a significant impact on my download speeds?
posted by InsanePenguin at 12:30 PM on May 28

At home, changed the port range but it didn't help. Reset the router to factory settings for the third time, it seems to have helped. Thanks everyone for the helpful suggestions.
posted by InsanePenguin at 3:42 PM on May 28