Bittorrent Weirdness...

[Bruco]

Here's one I could definitely use help with.

I'm running FreeBSD 6.3 with Azureus (or "Vuze" I guess it's called now) 3.0.3.4 installed.

When I open a .torrent file in Azureus it starts out looking normal - picks up the seeds and the download speed starts climbing. Then, after a few minutes, the download speed drops to almost nothing and eventually zero.

Of course, my first thought was that my dastardly ISP was shaping the traffic - but then I opened one of the same torrents on a WinXP box (with some old version of Azureus) and zoom! - I had super-fast download speeds and the file was downloaded in no time.

This is so strange. I've verified that the port is forwarded properly on my router (and checked with Azureus' built-in NAT check - it's fine). A netstat shows connections to the seeders on that port as well. I have the Speed Scheduler plugin installed, but this behavior manifests whether or not Speed Scheduler is activated. I've tried running Azureus as both a regular user and as root, just in case. Same results.

Perhaps most interesting, if I change my incoming port in Azureus, save the change, then go stop and start my downloads, they will once again pick up download speed... then after a moment drop to zero again. It's almost as though it's accepting the connections, then something is noticing them and putting a stop to it.

So, is the OS doing something I don't know about? I know if you port scan a FreeBSD box it will start putting limitations on connections automatically - is that what it's doing? (I know Bittorrent can generate a lot of connections.) Is there some utility I could run that would give me some more insight into this if it's potentially a networking issue?

Or is this some kind of bizarre application issue with Azureus? Should I try a different Bittorrent client? Should I try the Windows version of Azureus in Wine? (I've never used Wine - but I'm willing to give it a shot.) Has anyone seen similar behavior to this at some point?

Thanks.