DHT Peer Discovery Demanding on Network?

[Renara]

So I've been trying to track down poor performance on my network, and found that Transmission was to blame (well, my ISP provided router is probably to blame as well, as they're usually not great but I have no choice).

Anyway, after discovering this I've tried various ways to reduce the impact on the router, including limiting peers globally; reducing the global peer limit below 120 or so improves things, but what made the biggest difference was turning off DHT peer discovery.

I'm not trying to lay blame or anything, I'm just hoping to get a better understanding of how DHT is currently implemented, as it's possible there could be a way to reduce its impact on home networks, to that end I have a few questions:

• What kind of connections does DHT create, and does it keep them open?
• Does DHT create global connections, or does it use connections for each torrent? i.e- could number of active torrents be a factor?
• Does enabling DHT for peer discovery cause Transmission to become part of the distributed hash table? If it does, is that something we could opt out of?

If anyway knows the answer to these, or has any other ideas of why DHT would cause issues, or how I could prevent them, please let me know!

[Renara]

So I guess there's probably no way to reduce its impact? Is it restricted by the global peer limits in any way?

I'm thinking I may be premature in thinking DHT was the only culprit, as my network performance is still poor (thought disabling DHT definitely helped). I've set my global peer limit to 30, which should be easily handled even by the crappiest of routers, but I'm still seeing issues characteristic of the router handling too many connections; I'm curious, what else might be taking me above the global peer limits? While tracker updates aren't frequent, if I have a lot of active torrents is it likely that these are stacking up enough to become problematic? Many do seem to take a long time via HTTP before ultimately failing, so I'm wondering if perhaps HTTP tracker connections are piling up to make the problem worse; I'm actually now using a script to strip out http tracker URLs to see if that makes any difference.