Bandwidth hog

[alleby]

This issue is a copy of 1 year old issue on bugs.launchpad - as it seems it was not adressed there and here is the right place to report issues.

here is link https://bugs.launchpad.net/qbittorrent/+bug/951052?comments=all

original entry done by lunatik96

1st - I like the interface and the program and it has improved. I first started using on Ubuntu, but am in Windows nos. problem is present under both OS.

While similar to #503304. more specifically, when QBitTorrent, QBT is running and even apparently NO download or upload is occurring, it still hogs the bandwidth. Every time I run QBT, my other internet access fails. I may get one page but then ALL further requests fail in timeouts.

I am running WIN 7 64bit on a quad-core Intel 2630QM, I have 6 GB of RAM and ~200GB of free HDD. My internet connection is ~25Gb via Charter. I have set the limits very low including overhead and then once I run the program, the rest of the internet programs slow to less than a crawl.

This could be a maximum # of internet connections issue, but I find no info describing the number of sockets available, etc.

I am not sure your resolution procedure. but all the searches i found did not resolve this 4 me. If u can acknowledge a fix would be great, but I know u have many other concerns however this seems rather important b/c I have to choose to use QBT or my other internet programs. Even just confirming program installation fails while QBT is running.

Thx for the program.

I confirm this bug still exists in v3.0.8

I also experience same bug, exactly as described above. WinXP c2d 1.8Ghz CPU, 3GB ram, nvidia graphics card (this is lenovo R61 laptop). When using qbittorent even with very low speed download, web usage is almost impossible. However when using different torrent client (not sure if I can name it here) even with fast download web pages loads OK (but bit slower that without torrent naturally).

internet connection is 60mbit UPC (cabel tv) - via wifi.

I'd prefer qbittorrent, but this bug prevents me from using it.

[sledgehammer999]

Yes you can name other clients here. Do you have the same settings in qbt as in the other client? (number of connections/ports/half-open connection) Have you enabled utp on qbt?

[alleby]

Hi, did not expect such quick response :) The other client is Deluge 1.3.6 in default configuration which is: 200 max connections 4 max upload slots 8 max half-opened connections 20 max connection attempts per second. encryption enabled in both directions

currently no speed limit, downloading 300KiB down and 300 KiB up and internet browsing is very OK.

Settings in QBT: upnp/NAT-PMP enabled 200 max connections 60 max connections per torrent 4 max upload slots per torrent 30 max half opened connections (dunno if total or per torrent) upt enabled, no speed limits

Just opening QBT to read the settings made my internet go crawl... usually the pages do not respond at all or take ages to load. I turned it off (deluge runs 400down/300up) and I'm fine with browsing again.

the only difference is in half-opened connections and it's not that huge - 20 vs 30, so I think something fishy is going on...

[sledgehammer999]

Does this happen even if there isn't any torrent in qbt? (not even in paused mode) What happens if you set half open to 8?

[y401]

I am experinencing this problem too. While utorrent runs just fine, as soon as I ad a torrent to QBT, I'm barely able to load any website in my browser at all regardless of downloading, seeding, or even paused and seemingly regardles of any changes in QBT-settings. (currently have the same as alleby describes above)

[sledgehammer999]

What version of qbt are you using? OS? libtorrent version?(in qbt help->about->libraries)

[y401]

Installed QBT yesterday, so v3.08, libtorrent 0.16.7.0, QT 4.8.4. I'm running Win XP SP3.

[alleby]

Hi sledgehammer. I have QBT running with no torrent (half open connections reduced to 8) and so far everything is smooth. I will add something and see what happens. If slowness occurs, I'll ask a roommate how is internet running for him. I think it could be local problem than complete "bandwidth hog" on our network.

[alleby]

so I added a torrent, (25GB one) and currently it's going 800kB down / 200kB up and I experienced no major issues when opening web pages when having half-opened connections set to 8. So I raised it back to 30 and it seems I can still surf normally - which is weird as I did not touch other settings. I'll see in some time and report if I discovered anything.

Anyway I'm opened to do some testing if you have more suggetsions.

[sledgehammer999]

@y401 can you set half-open ports to 8 and test again? @alleby, probably something else is wrong and it is hard to troubleshoot. I will keep this open in case other people experience the same and can provide more info.

[alleby]

Hi again, everything went find, no issues with torrent downloading/seeding (25GB both directions) without any issues. Sure, the pages were bit slower than usual, but no big deal. (with half open connections set to 8, 10 or 30 - I tried but made no difference)

I then realised, that besides half-open connections parameter I also set my firewall to accept incoming connections. It was not configured all the time. I use Comodo Internet Security. Few months back I used PrivateFirewall and I'm not sure if I opene ports for torrent (but I also had the problem, so likely is not firewall related) Anyway - I realised that I opened that ports (different range) for deluge immediately after I set it up, so it could be the reason it worked without issues - so I opened them for QBT also and it was working perfectly (all that 25GB torrent).

I changed the firewall rule form "allow" to "block" to disable it it just a moment ago, and after a while I started to have the issue back - pages take ages to load. I enabled the firewall rule so I have the port open, but it did not fix the issue. The port is accessible from outside (verified with online scanner) but still pages open very slowly. So this issue is bit difficult to replicate and narrow down the culprit.

One more observation. When the issue occurs, web pages, although only 20-30 kB large take ages to open. When I try to download update in Malwarebytes Antimalware (6MB file) it takes the program quite long to establish a connection, the download itself however is quite fast, so I dont understand why few KB of webpage can't load.

UPDATE: when I was finishing writing this lenghty post, I noticed that webpages work fine again. So the observation is that closing or opening of the port causes the issue, with some lag, few minutes lets say. I don't know what are the inner worknigs or if this is even possible (does QBT messes something in windows networking???) but it looks like it. I'll give it few other rounds just to confirm.

[Gelmir]

does QBT messes something in windows networking

We do not install or modify any Windows components. Comodo Firewall, on the other hand, does - it installs a driver. Comodo had problems before (around version 3.5) - heavy network load will cause DPC latency to spike, causing sound clutter.

[sledgehammer999]

Also, I am not an expert in this, since the ports were blocked qbt probably tried again and again the same connections. Maybe this hit a limit imposed by the OS(or the router) on how many connections you could have at a time and then other programs couldn't make new connections.

I don't know if I should close this...

[alleby]

I tried same with Deluge - closing the incoming port in the firewall - and the result is the same. Web pages take ages to open, even with no data tranfsers in the torrent client (1 small torrent seeding). After opening of the ports it takes always few (more than a few) minutes and possibly a torrent client restart for the issue to go away.

Currently I'm with running QBT, incoming port open, half-opened connection set to 10 and I'm fine.

Web browsers I'm using is firefox stable and aurora - I'll try other browsers tomorrow. Also Comodo internet security is version 6.0.264xxx. I remember also some issues with early CIS v3, but mostly this is trouble-free software for me. As I wrote before I used to have Private Firewall some months ago and I also had this problem. If time permits, I'll give a try to different firewall just to exclude the possibility. I'd also like to hear from y401 what is his system/firewall/browser.

thank you so far

[alleby]

@sledgehammer something like this can happen, but there are many users that do not have public IP nor access to their router to open those ports, so this issue would prevent them from using torrent at all... :/

[alleby]

My point is that if the observation is correct, this behavior is not really acceptable. The software should deal with the fact it does not receive incoming connections. Outgoing connections are fine - and the SW has it's desired port opened and listening. The fact that no connections is coming directly because FW or router (or whatever) is not letting them through should not hog the whole internet browsing experience. (and I still fail to see any technicial explanation :/ )

[UrbanPotato]

this is not a problem with qBT this is a issue with your connection/router/modem what is happening is for one reason or another your modem/router is;t dropping the connections from the peers as it should even tho the torrent client is closed most likely because who ever wrote the firmware for your router was retarded and used some absurdly long timeout values for UD_assured or less likely TCP assured and the router just can't handle having that many open connections even if you have conlimit set in the client the swarm is still gonna try and connect to see what you have your settings at and what peers are best suited for the slots you have allocated

by changing the port settings you issue a ifconfig up/down via the routers OS this resets the routing table and clears the buffers now since the connections are still "assured" at the other end some of the peers will try and reconnect to your ip as per the nature of bittorrent but now the router has enough free ram to beable to close some of the connections out and gradually things get back to normal WRT54's as well and some Dlink and other cheap routers are FAMOUS for this issue tl:dr change the router if you wanna confirm this simply bypass the router and run your torrent client it should return to normal as soon as you stop torrenting it could also be some form of ttl adjust assfuckery as your isp is famous for attempting to screw with anyone trying to torrent

[alleby]

@rjc862003 thanks for your comment, however I'm not rally sure if the thing you described applies in my situation. As I described above, I was not closing/opening the port on the router itself, but inside Comodo Firewall. On the router the port is always opened. The router is cable-modem / router combo so I cannot circumvent it.

So far the observation is that the issue occurs when there are no incoming connections - the application itself has no clue that the connection are blocked by my router, or my firewall. To my understanding it request opening a port for listening from windows OS which happens in BOTH cases (I can see the app is listening on the port thru process hacker). Its just not receiving any connections. This also suggest that the connection limit of my router/OS is likely not to be breached, as I have much less connections - only outgoing ones.

I will do further tests with different firewalls than CIS, without firewall, and with ports opened and closed on the router itself.

Please do not close this issue until I figure out what is happening - I'd like to have all notes in one place.

[anontom]

I'm having similar symptoms but it's due to CPU usage. qBittorrent . . . . . . . . . . 15% firewall (ZoneAlarm) . . . 50% deferred procedure calls 17% other, misc. . . . . . . . . . . 8 to 10% That doesn't leave much, about 10% on a 3.2GHz dual core AMD. But I'm totally new with qBittorrent (about 3Hrs) so things aren't tuned yet. Also, there are 97 incoming streams for this first trial download. Data rate is 400KB/s and connection speed is 30Mb/s (about 3MB/s) nominal on Charter Cable. Speed usually measures 20+Mb/s

[UrbanPotato]

zone alarm sucks don't use it it is THE Worst firewall you can install if you are behind a router and are using vista or windows 7 firewall software is completely unnecessary and if you really believe you need some kind of AV use http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download personally I quit running AV/firewall software years ago I run a occasional scan with MSE like once every 6 months haven't found anything yet so long as you don't go clicking every ad under the sun and be-careful what you download and read the comments you should be just fine seriously zone alarm is bad mojo

[sledgehammer999]

The firewall is still needed in case you have rogue program installed that wants access to the internet(opens a backdoor) or it wants to phone home. Eg if I have an office suite I will never allow it to use the internet. The same goes for an uknown process.

Antivirus is needed again in case you are going to run a virus by accident. Only really experienced users can avoid that. So @rjc862003 don't go around suggesting people to not use AV and firewall. You don't know if they are experienced enough to not need an antivirus.

(sorry for the offtopic)

[UrbanPotato]

the issue I have is when people make issues in the tracker because they don't know any better the tracker is a not a forum its for reporting issues and tracking them

people really should learn to get along without firewalls and AV tho they will be far better off without the training wheels same with the guy with the issue with his internet dropping because his router and or isp is crapping out on him sorry to be a ass but it looks like you got enough unresolved issues in this tracker w/o the inexperienced users making it worse

./lockplease

[sledgehammer999]

(lets not continue this). Closing. If the OP, @y401 or someone else has something RELEVANT to contribute please continue posting. I will reopen in case of evidence that show that this is a libtorrent/qbt issue.

[PeteSapai]

I want to (finally) switch from uTorrent (3.3) to an (open source) alternative. I've been trying qBt for a couple of days now and I've found that it slows down my connection considerably (with qbt shut down, I get at least 20Mbit up/down at speedtest.net). I haven't changed any settings. Not only do the downloads in qBt quickly (within 2 or 3 minutes) drop from over 1MB/s to 100-150KB/s, webpages also start loading ridiculously slowly. I'm trying deluge at the moment (I added the exact same 4 torrents, 2 are complete, 2 are still downloading) and I get completely different (better) results: download speed is constantly at >1MB/s, webpages load normally. Can't say much more about this. On an unrelated note: I don't like how Deluge and qbt handle the chunks of the 'Do not download' files. I understand why it's downloaded, I just very much prefer uTorrent's solution (store all the excess bits in a single .dat file), in stead of all the empty folders and (empty!?!) .unwanted folders (for qbt) or simply downloading (part of) the unwanted file and putting it in the (unwanted) folder like Deluge does.

Summary: I tried both qbt and Deluge with the same 4 torrents. qbt slows down all internet (download) speeds where Deluge has no effect.

[UrbanPotato]

reduce the max connections/max connected peer or get a better router