Speed up your torrents
Written by Ernesto on November 30, 2005Help! BitTorrent is slow… This is probably one of the most frequently asked questions I get about BitTorrent. Unfortunately there’s not some kind of magic trick that makes your torrents go through the roof. But you could take some simple steps to optimize your speeds.
1. Cap your upload (most important)
Limit your upload speed to approximately 80 percent of your maximum upload rate. You can check your upload speed over here (never trust your isp). Once you know your maximum upload speed, change the max upload (to 80%) speed in your torrent client’s preferences.
Don’t get me wrong, everyone should share as much as possible, but if your upload rate reached it’s max, your download rate suffers significantly.
2. Hack the max TCP connections
If you’re on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This seriously hurts your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to a high amount of ip numbers. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it also cripples your torrent downloads.
A nice way to fix this is to download this patch, it allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok (more on this).
3. Check seeds and peers
A simple tip, but o so important. Always look for torrents with the best seed/peer ratio. The more seeds (compared to peers) the better (in general). So 50 seeds and 50 peers is better than 500 seeds and 1000 peers. So, be selective.
4. Change the default port.
By default, BitTorrent uses a port 6881-6999. BitTorrent accounts for a lot of the total internet traffic (1/3), so isp’s like to limit the connection offered on the these ports. So, you should change these to another range. Good clients allow you to do this, just choose anything you like. If you’re behind a router, make sure you have the ports forwarded or UPnP enabled.
5. Disable Windows Firewall
It sucks. Windows Firewall hates P2P and often leads a life of it’s own. So disable it and get yourself a decent firewall, Kerio or Zone Alarm for example.
Last but not least… Buy a faster connection…
Read more on optimizing your BitTorrent Speed.
Here’s a list of 20 BitTorrent tips and tricks.
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Research the firewall options a bit more.
I switched to Sygate after hearing of incompatibility reports between Azureus and ZoneAlarm 5.
http://azureus.aelitis.com/wiki/index.php/ZoneAlarm
Nice guide!
You’re right. But, Azureus seems to work just fine with the most recent ZA versions.
what’s wrong with microsoft firewall?
Ms firewall blocks things that don’t need to be blocked, lets stuff in that has to be kept out. And it is not customizable to any degree…
Another vote for Sygate Personal Firewall. Free for personal use, uncluttered (no stupid ’skinning’) user interface, customizable to death, tracks all sorts of neat stuff (executables changing contents, invoking each other, etc.).
Another good bittorrent tip is to use a client that allows you to select each file to be downloaded from a multi-file torrent (like bitcomet which I use, but I’m sure others handle this too). Open up the torrent, select the 2 or 3 files you want, and skip the 20 you don’t want.
Hey! Good guide, but I’ve just got to comment on some comments. I’m running the latest version of ZoneAlarm. I used to hate the older versions, e.g. before v6. Even Kevin Mitnick’s using it! ;-)
I’m using the latest version of Azureus with ZA, with no problems whatsoever.
Sygate has been bought by Symantec who are shutting down production. See: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39238815,00.htm
I’ve been using it for some time after running into problems with ZA blocking things even when it was saying that it was not. If that’s improved in recent versions, I may move back.
Another good suggestion is: wait! The torrent will slowly get faster as your client connects to more peers.
If what you want is also available from a well connected mirror, use that. It’s almost always faster.
Suggestion number 2 is not quite correct: according to the link that you provide XP SP2 limits the number of HALF-Open connections to 10. This may infact hurt BT during the initial connection phase of a download, but not during the bulk of the time. I don’t think changing it from 10 to 50 will provide any noticable speed increase.
Rick, you’re right, it should be HALF open connections. For all the details I provided the additional link.
And I’m not claiming that the speeds will change dramatically, but it certainly helps. For me at least..
how can i get more seeders and peers beacuse my peers are like 20(2000)
Let me chime in with a not so scientific experience. When using BitComet, one can see how many half open connections there are currently.
With upatched SP2 I was constantly seeing 10 half open connections and fairly slow take up on multiple torrents.
When patching the system to 10,000+ connections BitComet was maxing out on 65 half open connections and torrents got of a bit faster.
This seems to suggest that my system (cpu, HD, NIC, router, bandwidth or other bits) would not cope with much more than 100 half open connections anyway.
yea i get this problem when i try to use that patch thing to change half-open connections. it says it needs to change the name of the TCPIP.sys file during the patching, and i say it’s ok, but then it says it cant change the name of it and i have to change it manually, what do i do?
Have you disabled “system restore”?
how do i do that?
rightclick on “my computer” > properties > system restore.
i turned off system restore, but it says it needs to rename the file to change from 10 to 50, so i select yes, but then it says i have to change it manually, which doesn’t seem to work.
Why cant i disable the Windows Firewall???It says its administrated by a group policy?Dont remember telling it to do so….but does anyone know how i change it?
which is better to speedup torrent files
using windows firwall or
disable windows firwall and usig another one ?
you know what..recently iam think of istalling win98..instead if winxp..i think its better for these things..also its less memory consuming..how abt it?
Hey. I did all those steps yesterday. Today, when I woke up and turned on my PC, my torrents wouldn’t start downloading. They’re still not working. What went wrong?
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