my pings dont come back

January 15, 2006 10:09 AM

I only ping intermittently if at all, to a wireless router whenever bittorrent is started. Its not upload/download limits/bandwidth or the usual, as there does not need be any data tranfer to time out, just having the BT program running. Bittorrent itself is fast as a button throughout.

Upload downloads are limited, ports forwarded, the torrent speed is not the issue, its solely that while using BT, even if all torrents are stopped, there is really bad browsing, and pings to the router are randomly returned. As soon as BT client is closed totally, pings all return. it only recently started so i restored factory setting and reset all, but has anyone else fond the cause?

posted by ugrndhg to computers & internet (10 answers total)

What type of router are you using?
posted by purephase at 10:15 AM on January 15, 2006

BitTorrent opens a lot of connections. For the router doing NAT, this means that it has to keep a table of all these addresses so that it can do the translation. Some routers are underpowered or limited on RAM, and if you open up too many connections they start to feel the crunch. On top of that, typically stuff like ping response tends to be implemented as a very low priority event in the firmware, so if it's overloaded that's the first thing it will start dropping. Add all this up and you get the degraded performance.

In your BT client, set a limit on the total (global) number of connections to something like 100 as an experiment. If you see an improvement, play with the limit until you find the sweet spot. It's very common for crappy routers to have this problem, and any decent torrent client should have this option for this very reason.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:39 AM on January 15, 2006

If you're running a Linksys WRT54G series router, there's a fix here. A little further down that page there's some notes for other routers that have P2P issues.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 10:44 AM on January 15, 2006

Rhomboid writes "In your BT client, set a limit on the total (global) number of connections to something like 100 as an experiment. If you see an improvement, play with the limit until you find the sweet spot. It's very common for crappy routers to have this problem, and any decent torrent client should have this option for this very reason.
""

I concur... In my case, it was a linksys... I ended up loading it with openWRT, and everything was wonderful....

lower your connections... I got down to 70's before it started clearing up
posted by hatsix at 10:48 AM on January 15, 2006

are you using wondows or a mac?
posted by deafweatherman at 12:28 PM on January 15, 2006

windows... sorry
posted by deafweatherman at 12:28 PM on January 15, 2006

The official BitTorrent client isn't very friendly to wireless connections. I've had much more success with, say, BitLord. You didn't say whether you'd tried switching clients, but this worked for me.
posted by dhartung at 2:10 PM on January 15, 2006

Unlimited connections and wep security were enough to cause the belkin 54g router some stress. Above 80 global connections and it starts to feel the pinch.
i briefly switch from azureus to utorrent and the problem followed, i expect unlimited defaults are quite common across bt clients.
thanks for the push.
posted by ugrndhg at 5:06 PM on January 15, 2006

A lot of SOHO routers have connection limitations based on RAM, firmware defaults, or just plain poor implementation. If you're looking for an inexpensive router, with a decent amount of RAM, and a very active community support valve, stick with a Linksys WRT54GS (anything but v5) and aftermarket firmware. hatsix recommended OpenWRT (which is amazing firmware if you really know what you're doing), but Sveasoft, dd-wrt, or HyperWRT all offer start-up script options, re-worked connection limits, and general performance enhancements over the official firmware release.

It's pretty incredible what the community has done with this firmware.
posted by purephase at 7:17 PM on January 15, 2006

Sveasoft are major creeps.
posted by evariste at 2:39 PM on January 16, 2006