torrents taking up all my bandwidth???

[Marshalc11]

I share my house with 4 friends and not supprisingly we all use torrents, however when one of us is downloading it seems to slow down normal use of internet expolorer etc to the point where we have to stop the downloads to simply load certain web pages. we are with virgin media broadband and have a zyxel wireless router....i think it may be down to this cheap router or is there anything i can do to speed things up?

[Jay]

you need to limit the bandwidth used by the torrent and you ALL need to set this up

On your Torrent client you should have a way to limit how much bandwidth your torrents can use. I host loads of Linux .ISOs and just have it set to full bandwidth from 1:00am to 6:00pm and after that they use none.

[Templar87]

In addition, your router will have a limit on the number of active IP connections which might need upped. Or alternatively, you could limit the number of connections per Bit Torrent client.

[Splash]

both of the above speak the truth. Limit both the number of connections and bandwidth used by your bittorrent client on each machine and you should be fine.

[Betty_Swallocks]

I've found this as well. I don't know if it's a Virgin Media thing but we're on that too.
When I or my son have a torrent running, even when it's limited to 15k, it seems to slow web access down as if it was using the whole 20Mb bandwidth. Usenet seems to be affected too.

[kidzer]

That'll likely be related to the amount of TCP/IP connections, as opposed to the bandwidth limitation - a slow processor on the router may have issues.

(it could be the Max TCP Connections value in your OS causing the issue, but I assume that when he has a torrent going, and you dont - the problem is there - or thats how I read your post, in which case your gateway device will be the issue)

[Templar87]

Could be total IP connections, Betty. A single Bit Torrent client can use loads and it's particularly problematic if the timeout period is set to be a long time.

My router's default settings, for example, were max 512 connections and a 3600 second (~3 days) timeout. A single client was able to hit this limit quite quickly and as the connections weren't being dropped browsing would slow to a crawl until the router was rebooted.

[edit]
I'll add this is just in my experience, so apologies if it's tosh

[aidanjt]

I share my house with 4 friends and not supprisingly we all use torrents, however when one of us is downloading it seems to slow down normal use of internet expolorer etc to the point where we have to stop the downloads to simply load certain web pages. we are with virgin media broadband and have a zyxel wireless router....i think it may be down to this cheap router or is there anything i can do to speed things up?

It's a combination of factors, a) your router is beyond rubbish, and you'd be lucky if it can handle 1000 connections in a correct manner, b) with 4 of you torrenting, my best guess is you're opening at least 2000 or so connections (depending on client settings) c) your ISP is stingy on the upload bandwidth, d) your upstream packets (especially on such a rubbish router) are fifo'ed, so the ACK packets are getting massively delayed by the excessive seeding, so remote machines sending you data are waiting to see if you got the data it already sent, further reducing your bandwidth.

[adam1701]

set it up to about 80% of your max... if you have 448kbit uploads, set it to 40kb/s. 256kbit to 25kb/s .

[Betty_Swallocks]

Thanks Templar87 and kidzer.
I'll take a look at the router settings. I think it must be that because either of us running a torrent affects the other.
What setting would you recommend to set my router to?
It's a Netgear WPN824 by the way.

[Templar87]

I set mine to 2048 connections (max for the router) with just an hour timeout. This does mean apps. like MSN messenger will reconnect every hour, but I don't find this to be too much of an issue. You might find a longer timeout more suitable, so maybe worth experimenting to find the shortest one that isn't too annoying.

Looking at limiting the BT connections in the client might also be an idea - not sure what a reasonable limit is though. I'd guess 256, but I could be wrong.