Torrents freezing up? Here's a thought:

[Hippycat]

Hi all. I don't usually post around this part of the woods, but I've had a particular BT problem this past weekend, one which kinda scared me, but after doing a bit of internet detective work and using up some banked good luck, I think I've solved my problem. And in keeping with karma, I've decided to share what I've learned:

This weekend some of my torrents started to freeze up. For the record my BT client is Bit Tornado (latest edition, I think 0.314 or something) and my IP is Sympatico DSL. These torrents just froze in the middle of doing their thing. Once it was froze all d/l and u/p stopped of course, and if I paused the d/l the status light in the upper right hand corner turn neutral gray, and resuming it did nothing. Minimizing the torrent to the tray and then rolling the pointer over it would only bring up "Bit Tornado" rather than the customary torrent info. Closed the torrent outright and and restarting it works for about 10 minutes before it freezes up again! These were all weird things that had never happened to me before.

Now last week or so I got an email from a friend who had some freezing up issues of his own. At first I didn't think much about them as I know that both he and his system aren't totally up to speed But then when my own torrents stopped working, I got scared that:
1. We both caught some weird virus - possible as we both visit a lot of weird torrent sites (but having ran scans with 2 different AVs I was fairly sure this wasn't it), or
2. Since we are both on Sympatico DSL , maybe they have started throttling off all BT traffic in their system - much like Rogers is currently doing in Canada. <-- This one scared me the most because they probably will do this someday, as it costs them A LOT in bandwidth, but as far as I know, they aren't doing it yet.

However, snooping along in some forums here and there (mostly the Bit Tornado forums which are both messy and not particularly updated) I did noticed that the freezing issue seems to be a problem for quite a few other people as well. But the answer lies in that it's more of an issue with Bit Tornado conflicting with some various app configurations rather than issues outside your PC. So from what I can tell, it seems that there are three big reasons why Bit Tornado freezes up (and all of which applied to me):

1. Zone Alarm Firewall issues, (I use this)
2. NOD32 Anti Virus issues, (I use this)
3. Error/bug in Bit Tornado that freezes after 60 peers (I noticed that the ones I had problems with were BIG torrents with 100's both as S & Ls)

Here's the fix for configuring these to allow Bit Tornado to fly:
1. Zone Alarm: Open ZA control centre, click "Firewall", click "advanced options", put check marks in both "Allow outgoing DNS/DHCP in Trusted & Internet zone on high setting" boxes. That's it!

2. For NOD32: Open NOD32 Control Centre, open AMON & IMON (one at a time but do the same thing in each), click "setup", click "miscellaneous", find where is says "Exclusion" and click the edit tab, from there ADD your Bit Tornado from your program files. That's it! But make sure you've done the same thing for both AMON & IMON in the NOD32 control panel.

3. The over 60 peers freeze. If the above two steps haven't fixed your problem, open a torrent, click "perfs" in the upper right, click "advanced", change "max peer connections" to less than 60. Click "OK", then click "save". This should be done only as a last measure, say if the first two steps either didn't work or didn't apply to you. It will lower your speeds (both down and up) as you simply won't be able to connect to as many people. That said, better to be slow than to freeze!



These 'fixes' sure seem to be working for me. Before I did the 'fix', I've had to restart this one particular torrent 5 times only to watch it freeze 10 minutes in each time. After 'fix' it's now running like the wind for over two hours with roughly 169 peers & 79 seeds (no it's nothing here), plus 2 other torrents open and working fine. I should have guessed it was an issue with NOD32 as I've only recently installed it a couple of weeks ago (after that Windows exploit/virus a few weeks ago got everybody scared. NOD32 was a reliable way to catch it), but I haven't really been on any major torrents until this weekend which is when the freezing started. And with my buddy having the same freezing up issue (and him not using NOD32) I got hung up thinking it was our DSL. As it turns out, he uses Zone Alarm, so that's probably where his issue was stemming from.

Will update if any more issues arise.

[AAR.oner]

werd! thanks for this info hippy...