whalesalad

Conquering BitTorrent

Posted 2 years, 4 months ago at 1:34 am. 13 comments

I have not always been a big fan of BitTorrent. Before I became an avid user of the wonderful file sharing system, I used applications like Limewire and even IRC. Nowadays we have a multitude of BitTorrent clients, and a large selection of online search tools to find exactly the file you need. This makes using BitTorrent not only the smarter choice, but more efficient.
There are a few downsides to this terrific file sharing tool. For instance, a lot of the time you will be downloading a file and getting a very high upload, but your download speed will be very low. Another annoyance is when you are connected to only ten or twelve peers/seeders when there are hundreds or thousands out there.

I am going to try and give you a bit of help to make your speeds faster. Sure you may think, no it isn’t possible my ports are configured and my internet connection is fast, but most often you can squeeze a lot more out of your connection.

First of all, you will not be able to connect to ever seeder or peer because they have the right to choose who they are sharing with. It is pretty lame that they choose not to serve to you, but thats life these days. This is one reason why it isn’t fair to block other users from downloading from you because theoretically everyone should be able to download and upload with everyone.

One thing you can do though, is allow for more connections to you, and allow for more connections to others. You can use any client, but for this I will be using my favorite, µTorrent. Within the options area (Options > Preferences) select the Torrent Options category and you will be presented with a screen similar to the following.

From here you really only want to alter the first two boxes, the third box is optional. In the first, the Global maximum number of torrent connections box, you can set it to anything you wish, but I chose a thousand because I knew my connection and router could handle it. In reality you will never reach this number, but its a nice high number so we dont worry about maxing out.

Also set the Maximum number of connected peers per torrent to a high number so that you can connect to as many peers as possible.

Now that we have set these options, you will no longer be connected to ten or twelve peers or seeders. When I enabled these settings I began conneting to many more peers and seeders. Once this occurs, your chances of a higher speed go up because your connected to many more uploaders who may have a high upload speed.

So thats been taken care of, what about your problem with very high upload and very low download? This little problem comes down to your modem. No, don’t go out and get a new one, read on and I’ll explain why. No matter what type of connection you have, DSL or Cable, and no matter what speed connection, your modem has to convert the digital signal on your home network or to your computer, into an analog signal over the phone line or cable line. This conversion takes time and memory, and your cable modem only has a certain amount of buffer.

Also remember, technically you cannot affect your download speed because another machine is sending the packets and they are limited by their own network. Your client can connect to more peers and seeders which will increase the speed, but technically you cannot influence the other computers to send data faster.

With that in mind, your client will upload as fast as your connection will allow. You may ask, well how does this go back to the modem? Well if your modem/connection is overwhelmed with upstream packets, it will become saturated and only a small amount of downstream traffic will come through. How can we help this? Simply limit your upstream!

Alright so within µTorrent you have to go back into your options panel. From within the options area, go over to the network category and then go to the bandwidth limiting area. I can upload between 40-60kbps but that really takes a bite out of my download, so I limited mine to 20kbps. After limiting my upload, my downstream traffic took over and my downloads started screamin! Now what you want to do is check the box for an alternate upload rate when seeding to be generous with other downloaders, but if your still downloading other files it would be good not to enable that.

Hopefully these tips will help you get higher speeds downloading. Remember, always seed when you can and definitly don’t block any users just because they have 15% of a file. This is actually destructive because bittorrent doesnt download in order, so if you cancel those users they might acually have a part of the file that you don’t, they dont have to have the first 15% of the file, maybe they have the last 15%.

“Give and Ye Shall Recieve!”