How can I speed up torrent download time?

Question

Hopefully without having to pay extra!!!

Answer 1

Pay extra?  If you're paying anything at all then you have been the victim of a scam.

You've probably heard everything that I'm about to say a million times before, but just in case I hit upon something that you haven't tried, I'll run through them all.

1) Make sure you have properly forwarded your ports in your firewall/router.

2) Make sure your client is not banned.

3) Make sure the peers you are connected to have a good connection.  If they don't, and you are in a large swarm, you can just keep stopping and starting the torrent until you connect to someone with a very fast connection. If you have uTorrent or Azureus, you can see who their ISP is if you have reverse DNS enabled.

4) Try limiting your upload speed to about 80% of your maximum upload speed. This will allow you to download at full capacity. Once you have finished your download, please remember to set your upload limit back to infinite so that you can help seed at full capacity.

5) Increase the maximum number of half open connections in the settings menu for your client.

6) Make sure you are not using a leecher client that is ignored by legitimate clients (uTorrent does not ignore any clients, regardless of whether they are fake or not).

7) Since you implied that you paid for your bittorrent client, it is very likely that you are using a fake client or a leecher client, or one that violates protocol in some way.  Please try switching to a legitimate client so that you will not be ignored by other peers and will not be banned by tracker admins.