Struggled with a weird scenario today where uTorrent was consuming ~13%CPU and download speed appeared to be capped at 10 kBps. After eliminating the possibility of ISP throttling (Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic), a uTorrent bug (by updating to latest beta), Windows/driver bug (just by restarting Windows) and HDD corruption (rechecked HDD cables; ran CHKDSK /R), I was left with only one thing to try.
The torrent file itself. This was a massive torrent around 60GB in size (let's just say it's "Linux ISO images") but I have downloaded much larger files (a larger collection of said "images") so it did not make sense that it could be the culprit. Besides, the torrent had already downloaded a few gigabytes already. It's only when I restarted uTorrent and the program tried to Hash-check that it started exhibiting this strange behavior.
I tried deleting the torrent data and the torrent's PartFile (~uTorrentPartFile_*.dat) to no avail. Finally, I decided to remove the torrent and opened uTorrent. Success!
So the problem's gone now but I don't have the torrent. But it turned out to be OK because I found what I was looking for as separate torrents.
Epilogue:
Too many times, I encounter the same/similar situations but forget how I solved them. I end up performing the same diagnostic steps I performed during my previous encounter with the problem(with feelings of Deja Vu). This time however, with the help of this anecdotal blog post, I hope to avoid a similar fate the next time uTorrent exhibits these perplexing symptoms. Ciao.
