Speed up bittorrent download times?

Hi  allllec,

From the Torrent FAQ page at dessent.net I quote:

Here are some general guidelines to getting fast connections with BitTorrent.

    * Give it time! Be patient! This is the most important suggestion for most speed-related problems. Sometimes it can take a while to contact a slow tracker. The beginning of a download will be especially slow since you don't have any pieces of the file to share with others. Recently, trackers have been quite overloaded and it's common to get timeout-related errors. Leave the client open and eventually it will connect.
    * If your network uses NAT, make sure the BitTorrent ports are forwarded to the machine that runs the client. This will allow inbound connections from peers. Otherwise, only outbound connections will succeed. See this section of the FAQ for more details.
    * If you have a software firewall, make sure the BitTorrent client has the proper access.
    * Make sure the torrent is "live." Use an experimental build of the client that shows the number of peers and seeds to which you are connected. Or, check the status of the torrent (using the website's statistics or TorrentSpy) and make sure there are other people connected. To get decent speed, a torrent must have at least a few other people connected. The more peers, the faster the transfer will be in general.
    * Sometimes, limiting your upload rate will increase your download rate. This is especially true for asymmetric connections such as cable and ADSL, where the outbound bandwidth is much smaller than the inbound bandwidth. If you are seeing very high upload rates and low download rates, this is probably the case. The reason this happens is due to the nature of TCP/IP -- every packet received must be acknowledged with a small outbound packet. If the outbound link is saturated with BitTorrent data, the latency of these TCP/IP ACKs will rise, causing poor efficiency.

      Use a client that allows limiting of the upload rate, and set it to around 80% of the maximum rate observed. It can be tempting to limit the rate to very small values. On very healthy torrents, this will not adversely affect the download rate. However, when there are fewer peers you will generally get higher download rates by allowing the highest upload rate possible before saturating the link -- the (approx.) 80% sweet spot.

      To limit the upload rate with Mac OS X, try Carrafix. You'll want to set an individual cap for each BitTorrent port (6881 and up.)

Good Vibes!

Lobo

thanks and ive read that i was just woundering if there is any thing i could do to speed it up and how long i should do you have answerd my firsy question i now just want to know how long is a while because i dont really want to be leave it for a couple of hours to find out that it does/dosent work

thanks anyway if you can answer the second question that would be brilliant (ive put the points up 5)


cheers


alec

You must open ports 6881 - 6891 if you are using a firewall/router.

This allows BT to use the ports that it needs and stops the BT client from staying on yellow.

I would also like to add that many ISPs throttle (limit the speed) of data on common ports such as 6881-6891. So you may want to try a random port.
Azureus is an open-source JAva based bit torrent client which allows you (in the server tab of configuration panel) to choose any port you like. The default setting and architecture of this application is such that all torrents being seeded will use the port 6881 on your machine.

If you do choose a random port e.g 64000 or 4823 , do not forget to allow incoming connections to your local machine on your firewall. This should be fairly easy to notice if it works. Start a torrents with many seeders and if you start getting data, then your firewall is most probably well-configured.

Hope this helps.

akajohn that was a really good suggestion im anyoed now that i had already given the answer to somone else :(

thanks anyway

alec

aka:

allllec
[allllec]
[wM]Morph
NTLallllec

Um, if you want to make sure that your dl will work, you should download torrent storm.  Torrent storm allows you to do a manual "scrape" of the tracking server.  If you can even get one good scrape, you can download the whole file (assuming you don't close torrent storm.)  Torrent storm also tells you if there are seeds or "distributed copies"  Even if there are 0 seeds, a file can still be valid due to users having at least 1 copy between all the clients.  That's what "distributed copies".
-ben

Quick reply, havent had time to read the other comments, so sorry if I am repeating what's already been said.

I opened up ports 6881 - 6899 for both TCP and UDP manually in the Windows Firewall (Properties for your connection, choose the Advanced tab, at the bottom it should say "settings", add the ports there, one by one. Give them names like torrent_tcp1, torrent_udp1, torrent_tcp2 etc. Names mean nothing, just to keep it organised)

It takes time, but believe me - it was worth it for me!! (this is if you have the windows firewall enabled. Are you using Norton or something else open the same ports there)

UA.

****, sorry guys! That was already said.. my mistake.

UA.

Thx for the compliment.
Unless u have the time to contact a moderator, do not botherto try to "get back" those points.
Another comment is I have yet to find a better client than azureus in terms of features: you are able t osee , every single client ips, connected to you and at what speed they are downloading and uploading parts to you. You also see how many copies of the share files are available. As a rule if the number is less than 1, in the distributed copies , then u may have problems completing your download as mentioned in a previous comment. On the other hand if the number is 12.678 then your client is actually seeing an exact average of 12.678 copies of the same files. This does not necessarily mean that there are 12 seeders with 100% of the file, it could also mean 10 complete copies with bit and pieces shared among several people which do make up another '2.678' copies.

akajohn.

Hi allllec,

You can reopen the Question if you wish to reassign the points. No problem with that. I also find akajohn's input very valuable. Please refer to:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/Community_Support/help.jsp#hi17

Reopening a question is an easy procedure.

Good Vibes!

Lobo

I have found www.torrentspy.com to be a good site as well.

As for a good solid Bittorrent program, I would suggest Azureus @ http://azureus.sourceforge.net.

ResonateEcho

I use bitcomet http://www.bitcomet.com/ and have no problems with the download rate because I can control it.  I actually have good speeds if it is slow I just press stop and it finds a different seeder; and if your uploads/downloads are sucking up to much of your bandwith you can control that through Preferences.  It just depends on what you like to use though.

nice man seriosuly nice!, that client seems to get speeds up very fast, tested it with aout 10 torrent all but one are gonig at "acceptible" speeds, nice find mate!!! bokkymarkys that please :P

I use Azureus for my Bittorrent program.  I have cable internet and when i'm using the program my internet connection is very slow.  Even if i have no activity it's still slow. Is this normal or am i missing something in the configuration?

aye i get that, my workaround > only use at night when im not online

one more thing i think it gets me kicked of home network cos i will come back im mornin and im not connected however if its not been running there seems to be no problem