Utorrent help/question

[cibu]

Hello guys,
So here is my problem/question :
I'm using utorrent 2.2 and I uploaded a few torrents on a tracker . After the upload speed went up over 3-4 mb/s my laptop
(Intel(R)Core(TM)i3 CPU M370@ 2.40 GHZ
3 GB DDR 3 Memory RAM
64bit Operating System
500 gb HDD
DVD-Super Multi DL drive
ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 5470)
starts freezing and becomes slower and slower ... I can't even open a new tab in Chrome/Mozilla Firefox without waitting some time untill it loades and I can type . So my problem is that I can't do anything else ( in regular or just acceptable speed ) on my laptop because when utorrents starts uploading at 3-4-5 mb/s makes it feel like a Pentium 2 .
I know that this is normal , but I was wonderring if there is anything I can do ( some changes in Options/Advanced ) or anything else so that my laptops doesn't freeze so much .
Please help me , I'm kinda dessperate .
Any help would be apreciated!

[Tokeman]

Limit your global upload speed to 2.5 or 3 mb/s (I usually do at least 0.5 mb/s lower then my max) from within uTorrent.
Your connection requires upload speed in order to download at a good pace. If its all being eaten up by uTorrent (maxing your upload) then everything internet related will be slower.

Edit: Just noticed you said laptop.
On my laptop, when I had a 5400rpm drive, everything was slow when I put any sort of load on the HDD. Now I wasn't torrenting, but I did notice a HUGE difference upgrading to a 7200rpm drive, especially under heavy load. Lots of people say it makes not much difference, but I disagree. May be worth a look with how cheap drives are now if the first advice didn't help at all. Check your resource monitor to see where your bottleneck is (cpu, ram, HDD) but with your system specs, I'd say you should be fine unless your HDD is struggling for some reason...

[Cabalo]

Seeing you have 3gb Ram, you could go to utorrent's advanced options.
Under disk cache, tweak your options.
Do keep in mind that some of those tweaks carry some risks when done on a laptop, when subjected to a possible loss of battery power.

[shipwreck]

What other processes do you have running in the background on that machine (e.g. personal firewall, antivirus etc.)? uTorrent by itself should not cause such heavy CPU load, that processor of yours is way too fast for that.

Is it CPU related even? What does the task manager show during those slow downs? What processes consume most of the CPU cycles?

To rule out IO related problems, does uTorrent show you "Disk Overloaded 100%" in the status bar at the bottom of the screen during those slow downs? If yes, your hard disk is simply overburdened and can't keep up, which is not unlikely when it comes to 2.5" notebook drives. To fix that, you need to tweak your disk cache settings.

These are the settings of a very old (Athlon XP 1700, 1GB RAM, old 320GB hard disk (7200RPM though) machine that I occasionally use for torrenting.

utorrent_cache.png


It's fast enough to saturate my 100Mbit link at home in combination with uTorrent 2.2. If you have more RAM, you can increase the cache size.

torrent_speed.png

speed.png

[cibu]

No see I'm not downloading , I'm just uploading ( I uploaded a couple of torrents and I'm just seeding ) , the disk cache is set to 600 . I only got "disk overload " when I downloaded and I didin't change my disk cache .
I'm running Kaspersky 2011 antivirus ( doesn't have a firewall , I use windows 7 firewall) , Google Chrome and Winamp . Ocasually I open up a notepad , but that's it .
I think the problem is my RAM . I set the virtual memory ( from my computer/advanced /visual effects and performance ) to a total of about 5 gb ( from local disk C and D , each 2,5) .
As I said before , I'm not downloading anything , I'm just uploading ( to be precise not upload like upload after you download , upload by using an upload.php page on a tracker ) .

[shipwreck]

Both uploads and downloads are cached.

Again, what does the task manager say during those slow downs? Which processes consume most of the CPU cycles, what does the RAM situation look like? Task manager is your first step for a proper analysis.

I suspect that Kaspersky is to blame, since their products tend to slow down network performance considerably. But that's just suspicion, need more info from you (see above).

[Cabalo]

I would go with shipwrecks's opinion. Kaspersky has caused me and some of my friends lots of issues on internet connections, namely at online gaming.
Online gaming uses a quite similar P2P protocol, and kaspersky analyzes all those packets in a queue, therefore creating overhead on the connections and slowing the upstream of the packages.

Punkbuster dependent online games don't like kaspersky (and other AV solutions that include packet inspection) at all. Bad Company 2 is one of them.

[cibu]

Ok here are some screens from my Task Manager :

\


Ummmm my problem isn't slow internet speed , the entire laptop works slow . I believe it's because of the RAM , but when I look at Task Manager , utorrent only uses about 50-60 mb , but in the performance Tab , it shows that the Ram is used to the max ( about 2900 mb ) .

[shipwreck]

Is that during a slow down? RAM usage is excessive indeed. You have a lot of background processes running. You may need to tweak your services and disable stuff that does not need to run in the background all the time to reduce memory usage.

Have you tried to disable Kaspersky temporarily? What you could also try is to let Windows manage the virtual memory, and don't use a fixed setting like you did (5GB).

[cibu]

Yup , I did that during a slow down . I'd love to shot down a coupe of services but I have no ideea which is important and which is not . I could just read if it's run by the "System" or not but I don't really know ..
I'm gonna try to disable kaspersky , but my guess is that if I reinstall Windows it will run smoother .