After a while downloading torrents my network card stops working properly

Question

The situation

I download happily torrents with uTorrent for a long time, maybe 12 hours.

Suddenly, I notice my connection stopped working.

When I check uTorrent is still downloading stuff.

When I check other computers in the same network their internet connection works properly.

I can ping other computers in the network, but I cannot ping any remote IP.

What I tried

When I close uTorrent and open it again, it is unable to generate new connections.

Once I disable and enable my network card again connection works again, yay!

Once I open uTorrent again the same problem comes back, buh!

It's only when I restart my computer when the problem is solved and I can happily download torrents again, yay!

I also tried using a cable instead of WiFi, and the problem also happened.

My guess

The problem seems to be generating new connections, since uTorrent keeps downloading once the whole computer cannot use the Internet. And after I restart it, it cannot start downloading anything.

• Since it happens with 2 different network cards, the problem doesn't seems to be the network card.
• Since I restarted uTorrent tons of times, I don't think is that either.
• So what is between uTorrent and the network cards? Network services, so my guess is that the problem is caused by one of those.

I already restarted my computer this time, but what I'll try next time is to restart all the running network services, and check what happens if I change between LAN/WAN on the fly.

Any help is very welcome ^^

Solution

Sounds to me like your connection is being saturated and you need to adjust your uTorrent settings accordingly to allow some 'breathing room' for your connection whilst downloading.

This guide is written for Vuze but with a little bit of research you can adjust the settings so that they apply to uTorrent:

http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Good_settings

Comments

[William Hilsum]

Have you tried upgrading your network drivers?

[Zequez]

No, the latest Atheros drivers crash my computer. Also as I said I don't think is the network card issue, this also happens when I'm using another LAN network card.

[Zequez]

I have those settings very low. When this happens to me is after a lot of hours of full speed downloads, so I doubt it's because of the torrent settings, which are already pretty low.

[Moab]

@Zequez "a lot of hours of full speed downloads" explain full speed.

[Zequez]

Torrents downloading at the max speed of my Internet connection.

[Synetech]

Yup; if the NIC or router die or slow down, then just reduce the number of connections in the Bandwidth section of the Properties dialog.