Problems with torrents & Netgear router

07 Mar 2009

Every time I tried to download a file using BitTorrent, my internet connection would slow to a crawl within minutes, if not seconds, making surfing the web impossible. This affected every computer on the network, not just the one I was using.

For ages I assumed this was caused by Virgin Media traffic shaping, even though everyone says they do that. A couple of days ago I finally found the real reason for the problem: my Netgear (WGR614v6) router can't handle DHT being enabled. As soon as I disabled this (Options > Preferences > BitTorrent in µTorrent) I could download at normal speeds again!