Hi,

Lately I've been using m0n0wall as my house's internet gateway router.
It's been working great for my needs, especially since it's the first
gateway I've found that has a straightforward, yet powerful traffic
shaper.

However, when doing simple web browsing in Firefox on the same client
machine that is running utorrent, I get serious performance
degradation. This is not a problem with me saturating my upload; my
latency in other applications is extremely low and there are no
browser performance issues from other machines on the network when
utorrent is running.

After some searching around, I found this:
http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=8625. I followed the advice
to allow fragmented packets through on the port that utorrent is using
and that has solved certain other issues (such as an incorrect torrent
status in utorrent) but it seems to have had no impact on performance.

It's also interesting to note that I can do other applications from
this same client machine with no performance issues, it just seems to
be some peculiarity with Firefox. For example, I can play TF2 with
~10ms latency to nearby servers while utorrent is running. But http
takes forever to load pages. This is very perplexing to me.

The m0n0wall box is pretty much at the lowest end of the spectrum: p2
233 with 192 MB of RAM, but if underpowered hardware were the cause, I
would assume that the other clients on the network would be having the
same problem.

This is running utorrent 1.7.7, m0n0wall 1.233, and Firefox 3.01 in Windows.

Thanks,

Bobby

--
Bobby Moretti
moretti at u dot washington dot edu