What causes bittorrent to consume so much memory, even using utorrent?

[DoubleIPA]

Just curious if there is a more technically minded poster here who can give an explanation of why bittorrent clients, even the tightly coded utorrent, can eventually consume over 500MB of memory footprint after a certain point. I do have typically >10 active torrents and am trying to free up resources. Do active connections per torrent play a factor?

Thanks.

[HelenaP]

Making a run for it?

[enter8]

I have 40 open torrents, 18 of which are active, with about 400 active peers and about 2000 inactive peers. I'm DLing and ULing at 90% of my max (2.3 mB and 500 kB respectively). I recycle my router once a day, and occasionally I'll turn my computer off and back on again, but, for the most part it stays on for about a week at a time. I think the last time I turned it off was 4 days ago. In other words, it's been on and in that 40 torrent realm for about 4 days.

My client (utorrent 1.6.1) is fluctuating between 30 and 40 mB of memory usage. Firefox, on the other hand, is sucking up a whopping 100 mB of memory. I do have the 20 or so trackers that I use on a daily basis open in separate tabs, though.

[DoubleIPA]

I have 40 open torrents, 18 of which are active, with about 400 active peers and about 2000 inactive peers. I'm DLing and ULing at 90% of my max (2.3 mB and 500 kB respectively). I recycle my router once a day, and occasionally I'll turn my computer off and back on again, but, for the most part it stays on for about a week at a time. I think the last time I turned it off was 4 days ago. In other words, it's been on and in that 40 torrent realm for about 4 days.

My client (utorrent 1.6.1) is fluctuating between 30 and 40 mB of memory usage. Firefox, on the other hand, is sucking up a whopping 100 mB of memory. I do have the 20 or so trackers that I use on a daily basis open in separate tabs, though.

I have the same usage for utorrent (1.7 here), around 20-30mb according to the task manager. In fact, just going by the task manager there is no real resource hog to speak of. However after letting utorrent fly for a day or two, my initial memory usage (total) goes from around 300MB after logging in and launcing utorrent to over 700MB! I know this is something to do with BT because as a test my rig never goes over 350MB for days on end if I do not start torrenting.

It would just be nice to know what exactly is taking up that much resources, because it escapes the gauge of window's xp task manager.

[curlywagner]

Not sure about your problem, but a better alternative to Task Manager is Process Explorer, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processexplorer.mspx

[DoubleIPA]

Not sure about your problem, but a better alternative to Task Manager is Process Explorer, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processexplorer.mspx

Thanks for the link. I used to follow sysinternal's work years ago. It looks like Microsoft doesn't meddle in their affairs much as this is still a great tool. I think the culprit is that I have hundreds of connections to TCP, or open files to Device\TCP according to Process Explorer. I guess that would be the source of the overhead, and not much you can do about that if you want to have hundreds of connections per torrent?

[CiS]

Yea, my Utorrent is only using 11mb. Now Azureus that was a different story. That things used a ton.

[dwong721]

My Utorrent only uses around 10mb