Network dies after a while with high torrent load

[nocturnal]

Hi

This is the second time i've posted this to the list and explaining why 
will also explain some of the background for the problem. The last time 
i was having these problems was when i was downloading a certain thing 
each week using torrent, rtorrent running as a user. I stopped doing 
this for a while this summer but now i'm at it again and the problem is 
back. I think it's because this particular torrent has a lot of seeds 
and transfers a lot of data, very fast to me. I'm limited to 10Mbit/s 
here at home and ifstat -b reports over 10000 constantly for a while 
before my network just dies and no data at all gets sent. At this point 
i can fix the problem by running dhclient on my network card again. 
During one transfer of around 300MB i had to run dhclient at least 15 
times.

I have a IBM ThinkPad R40 laptop with a Intel Pro 10/100 ethernet card 
using the fxp driver. Right now i'm running 6.1-RELEASE but i've been 
running FreeBSD on this laptop since i had 4.9-RELEASE. I can recreate 
the problem anytime i find a torrent that has enough seeds so that i can 
maintain the maximum speed for 10-15 seconds. The time it takes for my 
network to die is very random. Sometimes my net doesn't die at all if 
the torrent can't maintain over 10000bit/s, it only has to drop once in 
ifstat for the network to handle it.

I'm about to call my ISP and complain because i doubt this is a FreeBSD 
problem but i would like to have some confirmation from others on the 
list that it is possible to transfer 10 or more Mbit/s with much torrent 
traffic using the fxp driver in FreeBSD. Another reason i suspect 
something with my ISP is the fact that it dies at the speed i pay them 
for, it could be some error in the equipment they use to cap my bandwidth.

I have no messages to show and i'm afraid i forgot to check ifconfig 
while the network was down but ifstat which is running constantly in a 
small window on my desktop reports 0.00 in and out while the network is 
down.
-- 



Med vänliga hälsningar

Stefan Midjich aka nocturnal
[Swehack] http://swehack.se