I have been using µTorrent for some time and I have not noticed such thing. Then again I will give it some attention. I usually control leeching and seeding pretty accurately. µTorrent is never on unless I know I need it on. What I have noticed is Steam downloading heavy updates and stuff with no prior notification, and that did slow down the net.
There is no better program. Problem could lie with the way you are using it. Or more to the point how you haven't properly configured it. Anytime you saturate your upload to max, your download speeds will suffer GREATLY and result in the severe speed loss you can see just surfing the net. You need to cap your upload speed in utorrent to about 80% of your max upload speed and this will go away completely. This is true for any and all torrent programs so don't blame the program! Another thing you may want to look into is limiting the number of connections in both utorrent and your router. Routers with insufficient RAM will choke under the number of connections torrent programs make. Even idle the DHT will still be making connections.
Well, now I understand why my PC kind of gets slow when I am downloading stuff, especially from torrents. Thanks for the info. Will try to increase my RAM.
Its the RAM in the ROUTER, not the comp, juts to clarify...at least that is how I understood Orbitings post.
I don't know that you can. What you could do is buy a newer router...that has better/more Ram. But the amount of ram in a router is seldom stated, you need to look at the fine text specs.
Have any of you ever thought i could be your ISP that is throttling your torrent downloads during peak time i know for a fact my ISP does this. Edit sorry just noticed when running utorrent it affects internet download speed never had that happen, in fact i just pay for rapidshare account now because of ISP throttling for all it cost bout £1.50 a week.
The first place to look is your router. Do you have a router? Can you post the model? Also how many torrents are you trying to download? Are you using a private or public tracker? Is DHT enabled or disabled? Have you ever looked at or changed the settings on it? If you have an older router, that can be the problem right there. Unless you tweak it or install another firmware (Tomato, or another one) you can see performance hits in speed. OR, you may have a nice, stable, capable router, we just have to know the model to be sure Now they make routers that are capable of the many connections needed for torrents. Older ones or cheaper models many times cannot handle torrents/games plus browsing at the same time. I had a Linksys and I put DDRWT on it, decided it wasn't for me, and put Tomato on. While it made things faster, firmware can't upgrade the hardware - I had to buy a better router that could handle the number of open connections and torrents. I bought an Asus Router, WL-500G. I am sure there are faster routers out there, but even without flashing, it was solid as a rock. I put Tomato on there and it was a bit faster. You can view the number of open connections, limit or throttle them, and also give priority to certain applications (more bandwidth for browsing, for example). Utorrent is the best client there is IMO.
You could be saturating your upload stream. If you are uploading at max speed, your download speed will take a big hit. Limit your upload speed to 50%.
It could be your internet service provider is throttling your connection. If that's the problem, enabling uTP should solve that. Why not just limit your upload speed or use a faster Internet Browser. If your currently using Internet Explorer you'll notice a dramatic speed increase by switching to Firefox 4 or Google Chrome 10. I'm using about 90% of my bandwidth and I can still browse quickly. If all that doesn't help I would consider upgrading your service to a higher tier.
Noone has actually addressed the issue discussed in the original post. "without downloading or uploading anything" the internet slows to a crawl. If anyone has a possible answer would be awesome, as I have started getting this issue aswell. It is reliable in it's crippling of the connection, all torrents off, open utorrent and bam problem, close utorrent and bam it is fine open and bam ect ect. Help would be greatly appreciated.
I switched to the open source qBitorrent a while back and Im very happy. No more ads or crapware and it works like a charm out of the box and has most the settings preconfigured like upload throttling