Azureus downloads slow

[rlw2 at cec.wustl.edu]

Hi all,
   I am running a Azureus (headless w/ webui) on my FreeBSD 6.1 system
and it works. The problem is that, for some reason I can't discover,
downloads are slowwwww. It is not because of the torrent. It is my
setup. Every couple hours download speed drops to under 1 kbps and
availability drops too, so I restart Az. and download speeds are as
expected for another couple of hours.
   What is going on here? Am i hitting some limit of open connections?
I'm pretty sure it isn't the max file limit b/c i get the same problem
when only downloading 1 torrent at a time. Any advice/solutions would be
greatly appreciatted.

Thanks a lot,
ryan