Why do torrents slow down my internet? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
How to avoid bit torrent to degrade my connection performance without limiting bandwidth usage?

I'm not a regular "torrenter", but I use µTorrent occasionally to download large files quickly (the Ubuntu CD, for instance). While µTorrent is running, my internet seems to slow down to a crawl. I get about a half-second delay with games, loading web pages takes much longer, and Skype conversations break up every once in a while. Why is this? It's not a huge deal since I don't have it running 24/7, but I'm just curious as to why I can get super-fast downloads in µTorrent, yet have the rest of my internet-based apps take a significant performance hit.

Also, if this is perhaps something specific to my router or my internet connection, I would like to find a solution or workaround.

Solution 1:

The torrent protocol is extremely efficient at maxing out your connection, so it uses all available resources to get the job done quicker.

Besides simply using all of your available bandwidth, it can slow down your connection simply by having open connections. Usually it is a good idea to limit the total number of connections/connections per torrent, as this will help to not saturate your connection.

It can also help to enable queuing of torrents, so that if you add 100 torrents, they don't all try to compete for your bandwidth and each go equally slow. Probably something like <10 active torrents is good practice.

Solution 2:

If you do not configure utorrent to throttle the bandwidth is uses, it will hog all of it that is available to you, leaving next to nothing for browsing. Source