µTorrent (and other torrent software) causes Google to stop responding?

[NerevarReborn]

I find this very strange, but when I have µTorrent running and use the web i often get issues with Google and Google owned sites such as Gmail etc. They simply stop responding randomly for a little while. If I'm searching, the autofill stops, if I click search nothing happens for a while. All other sites work while this happens, I usually open a few just to try and they all load, and reload new content. I have 100 Mbit + both directions and this happens no matter the current load in µTorrent. I can limit to almost nothing and it still happens. And it seems to ONLY be Google and their sites.... How is this even possible? There may ofc be other sites that I just don't know of, perhaps many. But all other sites I use and try always work, with servers in different countries.

Even if we disregard the fact that it seems to only be Google, what could cause this? When I'm using like 5% of my bandwidth...? A torrent could be ticking along at a slow upload of 150 kb/s, and it happens. Even though I can use almost 12-14 MB/s both directions, and at least 10/10 MB/s simultaniously (down/up). Is this a port issue? Would some sites have a tendency to stop responding more often if there was some issue with the ports? Seems illogical. I have tried different random ports, and I've tried to specify one that I manually opened in my router, doesn't matter.

I have tried different versions of µTorrent, and also other torrent clients, with the same results. Tried different browsers as well (Firefox, Opera, Chrome and IE), same results. The moment I close the client and it has fully stopped and is gone from my processes, the timeouts are gone.

Not sure what to try next...

 

[Guest]

I had a similar issue on my brother's computer, where µTorrent would have a memory leak and cause other programs to loop for while. It would then crash and everything would come back to normal. Is your client crashing at some point, or is your memory "saturating" while your client glitches out ?

 

[NerevarReborn]

Haven't had any crashes of the torrent client, and memory usage seems fine. Also, the web browsers themselves seem work fine, like I said it's only some sites that seem to be affected. Most work just fine all the time.

 

[Guest]

I don't know what could be causing this issue, are torrents running (leeching or seeding) when this happens ? If you leave the torrent client opened "idling" will it still cause issues ?

 

[NerevarReborn]

Will try to stop all torrents so they aren't even active, see what happens. Will take a little while to evaluate.

 

[Kewlx25]

Torrent could be opening up more connections than your firewall can handle. Try turning down the number of connections on your torrent client to something like 100. A lot of firewalls crap out around 2,000 connections, but some less, especially if older.

If that fixes the issue, start doubling your connections until it has problems again, then go back one step. You probably don't need more than 1,000 connections.

 

[NerevarReborn]

Good idea, but seems unlikely when it happens even when I only have one or two torrents uploading, at a slow speed to like 1-3 peers. Also, it's a fairly new router, gigabit specced on all ports, that model can't be many years old at all. I'm trying now with the client open but all torrents stopped, still no issues, but way too early to tell. Not sure exactly what it means if stopping all torrents solves it though. It's not having the client itself open that causes it, so therefore it is any, no matter how little, traffic that causes it? Still, too early to say if that's even the case yet.

And why oh why is it only ever google sites that stops responding? That is the part that bugs me the most.

 

[Kewlx25]

I had a similar issue on my brother's computer, where µTorrent would have a memory leak and cause other programs to loop for while. It would then crash and everything would come back to normal. Is your client crashing at some point, or is your memory "saturating" while your client glitches out ?

uTorrent uses memory mapped files in a way that causes the memory to never be freed. It's mostly an issue with the way Windows does it, but it is documented to work that way and Microsoft recommends not to use them that way.

uTorrent refuses to make the minor change to their Windows code because "Linux works fine this way".

Because memory mapped files are actually handled by the OS, it doesn't report as memory under uTorrent, but it will eventually use all of your memory if you're seeding enough and just let uTorrent run non-stop. Microsoft really should make the fix, but you'd think uTorrent would make the simple fix to bandaid the issue.

 

[Guest]

Learned something today, thanks a lot!

 

[NerevarReborn]

Seems reducing global connections to almost nothing doesn't help either. And I also think that opening the program doesn't cause the issue, it has to transfer something. No matter how slow though.

And it really only is google that stops responding. I just can't understand this one bit. I can open up fifteen heavy webpages while google lags out, they all load fine. Sometimes google is gone for like 30-45 secs. And it happens at least once or twice every hour if I'm actively using it. And once I stop everything in the torrent client google stops doing this.

Just so effing random problem this. That's what bugs me.