[TriLUG] azureus/bittorrent slowdown

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

For a couple of years now, I've left my desktop machine 
running as a bittorrent node. When I start it up, it uploads 
at the set max speed. Then after a couple of hours to a day, 
it slows down to 10-25% of max_speed. If I let it run for a 
couple of weeks and monitor it with rrdtool, I see the speed 
come up to max now and then but mostly runs at 10-25%. 
However every time I stop azureus and restart it, it runs 
flat out for 6-24hrs.

I wonder what's causing the slowdown. Could it be my ISP 
(Frontier) looking for bittorrent packets? The logs from 
azureus are full of problems,

eg

Exception while processing the Tracker Request for http://tracker.bittorrent.am:80/

whether it's running full speed or 10% and I have no idea 
what to do about any of them (if indeed they are problems I 
can fix).

Anyone got any ideas why azureus slows down after a couple 
of hours?

Thanks
Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!