Saturday 23 February 2013

UDP Torrent Trackers Connection Timed Out

Following the most recent update to uTorrent (version 3.3 build 29126) it was noticed that there was a problem with UDP trackers reporting a status of "Connection timed out" most of the time. Manually forcing an "Update Tracker" sometimes cured the problem but became very tedious to maintain. Investigations eliminated a problem with some of the trackers actually being offline temporarily, After a bit of tweaking, the fix proved to be quite simple. Open uTorrent and select menu item "Options" and then "Preferences".  Under the "Advanced" section, scroll down to find parameter "bt.trans_disposition". Change the value of this parameter (which was set to 31) to the value 15, effectively switching off support for the new uTP header which is not backwards-compatible with older protocol handlers. Restart uTorrent. Problem solved.

It seems that the installation of the uTorrent update resets the value of parameter bt.trans_disposition, since I had previously set this to 15 on earlier advice.

16 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot for this tip! It worked. :)

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  2. Thank you !!!! Worked like a charm !

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  3. still doesnt work, this is sooo annoying D:

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  4. I have been getting this problem myself a lot recently and this "old" fix should be somewhat irrelevant now. I have done a fair bit of "packet sniffing" to try and pin it down. When using a proxy service, I find that the proxy just "stops talking UDP" to the listening port on the client (that is the port number you define in utorrent preferences) or when using no proxy I find that while there is still incoming UDP traffic, it is as though the client has "stopped listening". More recently though, using a proxy, I have found this condition immediately on utorrent startup as well which is particularly annoying since it happened twice just today. I have this suspicion that ISPs are beginning to interfere with this type of internet traffic again but maybe that is just paranoia. Nevertheless I am considering switching to a full VPN service with fully encrypted data to see if it makes a difference. I will post up here with info in due course.

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  5. Having "mucked about" with this for some time now I get the impression that the real culprit is DHT, since disabling this made the problem go away for at least eight hours of continuous operation. Sharing large numbers of files will presumably generate a fair amount of UDP traffic every time that a DHT update "burst" occurs and it may be this which generates a failure by overwhelming the client in some fashion. To investigate this further, I propose re-enabling DHT and tweaking the client Advanced Setting "DHT Rate" to see if it has an observable effect.

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    1. What did you put in the Advanced Settings DHT Rate? I have -1 in mine. Thanks. Pia

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  6. This problem seems to have been completely fixed with uTorrent version 3.4 and I hope it can now be regarded as a dead issue.

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  7. I made another change recently which might have been the actual cure, rather than the upgrade to version 3.4. What I did was set my network connection to use Google's DNS servers at IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and also set these up in utorrent Preferences - Advanced - isp.primary_dns and isp.secondary_dns parameters.

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    1. I'm using Google DNS, but change DNS also in uTorrent preferences unfortunately don't work for me. ipconfig /flushdns, restarting also. Sometimes UDP magicaly works, one ip from tracker on UDP-only torrents and DHT can do the rest, but I don't know, why. Just magic.

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  8. Thanks but it didn't work for me

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  9. OK, this is weird and really freaking annoying. I used the original fix posted by changing the parameter to 15. It connected a torrent that originally appeared to not even be looking for seeds. At the same time it totally stopped the one that it seemed to be focused on before. I don't know if this is an ISP problem or what. Not using proxy. Probably should be. Anyone know of free ones that have reasonable speeds? Also, I'm not a torrent genius so could someone please explain to me what changing that parameter actually did? Thanks! Good luck everyone, and if anyone figures this out any further plz post.

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  10. Love you man! works perfectly. All the trackers are now "working" !

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