Okay.. on HTTP I can dwnload 94.6kb/s max. uTorrent (which should be faster) is between 4 and 10. whats wrong?

Question

i have DSL internet from verizon. are they known for blocking off torrent downloads? My friend really wants this linux distro and its gonna take several days at this pace. :(

on most HTTP downloads it says around 94 kb/s.

last night for about 20 minutes i had this torrent down at 30 kb/s.

but it just went straight back to 4 - 10 kb/s.

torrents should be faster!!! i should have this done by the end of the day! so how do I fix it? i want at least 100kb/s. but ill probably have to settle with around the 30 i had shortly last night...

Answer 1

BitTorrent protocol is based on a cooperative network of seeds and peers.  It is *not* always faster than an http download.  It all depends on the speed of a particular http server site vs the various upload speeds of seeds and peers on the torrent swarm.  So, if the swarm (number of seeds and peers) is small, like under 20 total, then download speed can suffer.  Typically, I find that swarms of less than 50 hosts will not get much beyond 50-100Mbps.  Also, each peer or seed will select only a certain number of peers to upload to which is configured as the number of upload slots.  What you want to do to increase your download speed is to maximize your chances of getting selected by peers.  Here are some general rules of thumb:

1. set your upload rate limit to around 75-80% of your max upload bandwidth.

2. set the number of upload slots to no more than 5-10 per torrent.  Lower this number if you seed/leech lots (>10) of torrents at a time.

3. turn on encryption.  Encryption helps to bypass any rate shaping your ISP might be doing.

4. Reduce the number of max connections.  Many home routers will slow down dramatically with too many connections.  Start with something like 100 and adjust up or down by 50 to see if performance increases in either direction.

5. Configure port forwarding on a non standard port like 40000 something.  This will allow you to get inbound connections from outside.  Note that some ISPs will block inbound connections outright or limit the ports where this is allowed.

Now, what is your internet bandwidth.  94kbps is modem rates so are you using a modem?  If so, I would stick with http or ftp downloads if they are available.  There's not much advantage to BitTorrent at those rates.