VLC crippled my internet connection with a SYN flood

[sprucejuice]

My internet went down, I couldn't connect to my router. Swapped out the router, still had issues. When I started looking at packet counters, it turns out a PC was sending a SYN flood to 50.31.167.247. After closing most programs, I realized I couldn't close VLC out of the taskbar icons (the background icons off to the right of the taskbar, not the foregound tasks). Once I killed the process, it died, and the flood stopped. This IP seems to be linked to content I might have streamed (it seems NPR hosts out of that IP), but I'm not sure how long ago it was, or what got VLC into this state.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Make sure you did not enable HTTP reconnect. Playlist loop can also cause problem.

Regardless, if you keep the TCP timeout to a sane value, VLC cannot SYN flood. It does not have that low level access to network, the OS is responsible for pacing and retransmitting SYNs.