Network not responding on high load/connection count

[c247441]

I'm running a headless Windows 7 guest (32-bit) on Ubuntu (64-bit) to which I connect through TightVNC on my local LAN.
If I'm running multiple programs which open a lot of connections the network becomes slow (vnc lags, sometimes it takes minutes until it reponds again) and ultimately unresponsive, the only way to recover is to kill the guest and start it again.

The guest uses a samba share from the host which uses a separate host-only network interface (separate subnet) all other connections go through a bridged network card on the host, this has open files all the time maybe a few dozen or more I'm not sure about that. But this also happened before I separated the network.

I'm using a lot of P2P programs on the guest machine like eMule, uTorrent, Retroshare, Freenet, Stealthnet and JDownloader, just running one or two is no problem most of the time but running more especially resource heavy ones can lead very fast to the network lockup, sometimes this takes only a few minutes.

Also I encountered the same problem in the past while trying Zentyal for gateway and infrastructure for a small home network (~8 PCs) which randomly locked-up but I don't need that anymore.

[Perryg]

Use the VirtIO drivers instead. Fixes most network speed issue.