Slow torrent speeds

Common possible problems that can cause low torrent speeds:

- you are using ADSL, or any kind of other service where your Upload and Download depend on each other. In this case, uploading can hog your download speeds. This can especially hurt in ADSL where the download/upload ratio is around 1:10. Simply cap your ul speeds to around 3/4 of your max, or whatever value it performs good on.

- port forwarding, as mentioned above. Routers are nice if you need to split your net connection or you want embedded firewalls, but they are also a pain in the ass. If you just have a modem that connects to your PC, you shouldnt have problems such as this though. (So don't go and buy a router thinking that it will improve your speeds)

- If you are running Windows XP SP2, it limits your maximum halfopen connections to ten. This was done as an attempt to make worms and other kinds of virii to spread slower (less open connections = less traffic). In the long run, this can cause a huge problem if you have many applications connecting to the net at once. There's a patcher that can edit the number of possible connections though, google for EvID4226Patch223d-en.zip. Since Bittorrent is based on connections happening en masse, having more halfopen connections will absolutely improve your speeds.
(note: don't set the number of connections too high though. Your computer/cpu/network card may not be able to handle the strain, causing huge cpu usage, worse speeds, timeouts, ddos attacks, multiple homicides, tentacle rape and ufo abductions, and so on. Unless you have a monstre computer, something around 50 is just fine. I use 75 on my dual core cpu and 2mb adsl line, and so far encountered no problems.)

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Tsunade

I didn't read all the posts here (have to go to sleep like now)... but don't have more than 5 connections open! I have super good speed but I use to have 6+ torrents at the same time and that gave me some shitty download rate

So 5 connections max, test to see if your portals are open... other than that check to see who's uploading (country-wise) at the time... that worked for me at least

Uh nonono. Your webbrowser already uses 2 connections (IE default - on Firefox it's probably more), that leaves you with 3 for torrents which is insufficent for about anything. Think about it, one connectino for tracker, and 2 for peers? You wouldnt be able to download anything with only 5 connections open.

This number was actually around 70+ in XP SP1 and earlier systems, they reduced it in order to make worms spread slower (since they have less to no free connections to use). So if you have a proper firewall and antivirus, you can leave it up at 50 or 70 and not worry about worms.

There's nowhere I can't reach.