Time Capsule freezes when I download a big file!

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Level 1

8 points

Time Capsule freezes when I download a big file!

Hello everybody!

I have a very unpleasant problem with my Apple Time Capsule 2TB 5th gen.

I have 2 Iphones, AppleTV and 2 Macs in my wifi network, everything works great! But, when I download any big file from a torrent internet connection falls down after 10-15 minutes... a green LED shining on the Time Capsule, Airport utility tells that the internet is connected but non of my devices has the internet connection. It lasts for 15-20 minutes and internet recovers by itself. Nothing really helps with that, I tried to reboot it, change settings, but nothing helps.

Again, green LED, no errors, internet is connected but no internet.

My cable modem works, if I connect my appleTV to the cable modem through the cable it will have the connection. At the same time, if I connect my appleTV to the Time Capsule through the cable when it frozen, appleTV won't have any connection.

The same story if I download to the Time Capsule's hard drive or to my Mac.

I have an idea that Time Capsule is overheated but again, I see no errors.

I will appreciate any help!!

Time Capsule-OTHER

Posted on Jul 21, 2016 7:49 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

LaPastenague

Level 9

67,244 points

Jul 21, 2016 11:46 PM in response to Mech314

Torrents can overwhelm the NAT table of a router.

In the torrent client reduce the speed and number of seeds.

What cable modem do you have?

It sounds like it is a gateway device not a pure modem so the TC might be in the wrong mode?

Also who is your ISP?

IF they have moved to IPv6 that can also introduce issues.

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Answer 2

Mech314 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 22, 2016 8:44 AM in response to LaPastenague

I tried to reduce the speed to 1Mb, it didn't really helped.

I use Arris CM820, it is a DOCSIS 3.0 Cable modem. My carrier is Suddenlink. I didn't hear anything about moving to IPv6, but when I was trying to repair the connection I turned off the IPv6 protocol and no changes occur.

Yesterday I turned my apartment fan to the Time Capsule and started to download a big file ~7gb. What surprised me is that I finished downloading it, sometimes speed was higher the 9 megabyte per second. BUT, after 5 minutes Time Capsule freezes again...

It is not really hot, but still it seems to me that it overheat..

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Answer 3

Jul 22, 2016 2:24 PM in response to Mech314

I want you to test a big download eg el capitan OS is about 5 or 6 GB .. try downloading that. But not using Torrents.. just the standard download.

If it fails then I would say the problem is TC hardware in some way. If it downloads ok then the TC has issues with your Torrents client.

You can monitor the internal load of the TC via the diagnostics in the airport utility.

Are you perchance also copying the file to the TC disk? That would add a lot of extra load to it if you are simultaneously downloading and copying the file to the TC. You should finish the download to the computer, then copy the file to the TC if you want to store it there.

Open the Diagnostics & Usage. You might need to actually open the TC to full edit mode (click the TC icon then click edit for the diagnostic to show up in the menu).

You can see there are a heap of detailed logs of the TC fan speed and temperature.

Have a look also at the system info area.

Look at the load average..

Also memory. I spent sometime before figuring out what was represented by each value..

Post your values and compare them.

Here is a post I did a while ago to help interpret the numbers.

The most useful is probably the system info.. although to interpret the info I am going to need to tap into systems.. and guess.

What I am interested in mostly is memory.. of course CPU hitting 100% is a killer.

Now I am trying to interpret what that line of numbers means.. by tapping into the console (this is not possible to normal humans)

# top -bt

load averages: 0.62, 0.19, 0.13;

up 15+03:15:03 10:55:24

131 threads: 5 idle, 124 sleeping, 1 zombie, 1 on CPU

CPU states: 1.0% user, 0.0% nice, 20.8% system, 0.0% interrupt, 78.2% idle

Memory: 25M Act, 128K Wired, 6656K Exec, 572K File, 153M Free

I am not sure how to exactly correlate memory via the Airport utility and memory via ssh..

I think you can just ignore the zero value from AU and the rest is in order.

I wish I had a nice easy way to show you how busy the NAT table is. Sometimes finding stats like connections is difficult without full CLI access.

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Answer 4

Jul 22, 2016 2:47 PM in response to LaPastenague

The test at smallnetbuilder of the AC extreme.. fundamentally the same router.. gives it 32,000 connections on the NAT.. which should be fine.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32158-apple-airport-ext reme-80211ac-reviewed?start=1

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Answer 5

Mech314 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 22, 2016 5:09 PM in response to LaPastenague

I will try to download el captain today and track the TC's load and tell you about the result.

Yesterday, I opened the TC and cleaned the fan, it was pretty dusty, but I didn't try to download anything after that.

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Answer 6

Mech314 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 27, 2016 11:02 AM in response to LaPastenague

I made some screenshots with Capsule's properties when it's "frozen". I won't post them here because it seems to me that I have found how to solve this problem.

I turned off NAT and Upnp port mapping both in the Time Capsule and in the torrent software, also I have limited the speed by 3MB per sec.

So by far it looks to be working good!

Thank to everybody for your help!

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