TorrentFreak

75 Responses

1 Feb 05, 2006 at 07:21 by falafelboy

If everyone followed this advice, everyone would be a leecher and never keep a one-to-one ratio.

2 Feb 05, 2006 at 07:55 by S33DMan2932

FALAFELBOY is right. REAL torrenters should care more about sharing than d/l speeds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SEEDMAN~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3 Feb 05, 2006 at 13:37 by Ernesto

Falafelboy and S33dman, I think the terms were a little confusing. Upload rate is not the ratio but the speed.

This has NOTHING to do with leeching. But anyway, thanks for the comment. I changed rate to speed to avoid misunderstandings.

In fact, these tips will probably speed up the total swarm speed

4 Feb 05, 2006 at 18:11 by falafelboy

Maybe I don’t understand.

For ex:

“so if your maximum upload speed is 128 kb/s, the optimal upload rate is

128 / 8 * 85% = 13.6″

In other words, if people have a capacity to seed at 128 kb/s, then they are expected lower their upload to 13.6.

That’s the why I understood it.

5 Feb 05, 2006 at 19:41 by fuck comment entry names

Most people set up the client so badly or do not set up it at all. Such setting means no seed and thankfully according to torrent math model no leech. The less they seed to individuals, the less they (mostly) leech. Helping non-tech users is only good for the whole thing. And rationaly limited upload is actually better for the swarm AFAIK I studied the torrent convergence models.

6 Feb 05, 2006 at 19:43 by fuck comment entry names

“The following setting worked best for me.

upload speed / 10

so if your maximum upload speed is 256 kb/s, the optimal upload rate is

256 / 6 = 42.6″

Sorry I don’t understand this; is there a typo or did I skip something?

7 Feb 05, 2006 at 19:48 by fuck comment entry names

Ah, you included the percentage, don’t you?

8 Feb 05, 2006 at 20:34 by Ernesto

Sorry, I think I rushed this post. I will rewrite it to clear things up asap

Falafelboy.. The settings in the torrent clients are in kB/s, so I’m basically saying that you need to use 85%.

Unfortunately I had too much beers while writing it. ;)

9 Feb 05, 2006 at 21:01 by Ernesto

just did a quick rewrite, you guys were right the post didn’t make any sense and was full of (copy / paste) typo’s.

I hope it’s a little more understandable now.

10 Feb 06, 2006 at 01:28 by David Bendit

In regards to your information on TCP configuration, http://www.broadbandreports.com has extensive FAQs on the subject, an entire forum, and a myriad of tools to aid in the proper configuration of TCP.

11 Feb 06, 2006 at 21:58 by EuParazit

goood

12 Feb 06, 2006 at 22:47 by falafelboy

Sorry about that.

That makes more sense!

thx.

13 Feb 07, 2006 at 17:32 by JNelsonW

When I do the speed tests, my down-speed results vary wildly. My advertised speed is 4000 kbs, but my results range from 2500-6000 in the tests. Should I base my max dowload speed on my advertsied speed, my highest rating, or an average of all my results?

Oddly, my Up-speed tests fairly consistently in the 688 range.

14 Feb 07, 2006 at 20:17 by Ernesto

I would advise to take the average speed, but there are not a lot torrents out there where you will reach that speed.

Note that the UPLOAD speed is far more important. Is the upload varying too?

15 Feb 07, 2006 at 21:03 by JNelsonW

Ernesto- My upload speed seems to consistantly test at about 688 kbs. It varies slightly (from about 600-700) but for the most part they seem solidly grouped around about 88 kBs.

As for the down-speed, you’re right; my actual download rate in Azareus has never even come close to 95% of even the lowest of my speed test scores. SO I suppose it doesn’t matter much.

Thanks!

16 Feb 08, 2006 at 01:06 by Ernesto

If you limit the upload to 80/85% of 88 you should be fine

17 Feb 10, 2006 at 14:23 by aveb reVerse

this actually works in a strange way my downloads went from 20kbs to 60kbs welll some of them did anyways……. Thanx for the advice god help it was.!

18 Feb 10, 2006 at 14:24 by aveb reVerse

well mabye not godly help either but it as pretty good at saving my downloadins some time.

19 Feb 12, 2006 at 23:13 by theJUGGALO

Why is’nt there any download or add-on which you can download,and that will make it faster??? If there is,can someone PLEASE e-mail it to me at Sascha.albany@webmail.co.za and PLEASE zip it first,thanks!

20 Feb 14, 2006 at 03:49 by adam

because you can’t go faster than the bandwidth you’re alotted, no matter what the pop-ups and software people trying to cheat you will say

21 Feb 14, 2006 at 23:16 by Crayons

results said i was 4858 down and 748 up. wat should i do now?
i put in the half open tcp patch and that workde out pretty good!

22 Feb 17, 2006 at 17:44 by vesaliuz

like most people, i would like to had a highest download speed, but i always keep my upload speed unlimited because i believe that share is the most important thing in the “torrent philosophy”

23 Feb 17, 2006 at 19:18 by Ernesto

-vesaliuz

capping your upload doesn’t mean you can’t share. Just leave it open a bit longer then. People actually benefit more if you try to get the most out of your connection because there will be less “rare” bits. So the best torrent philosophy will be “get the most out of your connection and keep sharing”

24 Feb 18, 2006 at 19:32 by craigl

yes but if everyone capped there upload the torrent would take forever. You contradict yourself, you’ll be telling people to not to seed next. All that has been provided in these blogs is either completley obvious ie, not saturating your download speeds or false information on speeding up your torrents.

25 Feb 20, 2006 at 04:01 by pbng

good

26 Feb 24, 2006 at 07:17 by joon888

My upload is 384k, my download is at 7.5Mb, could some of you suggest some settings so i can try them.
Any help will be appreciated! thanks.

27 Feb 25, 2006 at 02:10 by snake

good thanks

28 Feb 25, 2006 at 23:58 by lee

i like the site alot and iv gained vastes amounts of knowlage

29 Feb 26, 2006 at 02:08 by Ernesto

thanks lee :)

30 Feb 28, 2006 at 04:57 by jojo chinto

Somebody posted this:

————————————

Maybe I don’t understand.

For ex:

“so if your maximum upload speed is 128 kb/s, the optimal upload rate is

128 / 8 * 85% = 13.6″

In other words, if people have a capacity to seed at 128 kb/s, then they are expected lower their upload to 13.6.

That’s the why I understood it.

—————————————-

128kbs / 8 = 13kB/s

speeds are often listed in bits/second, but really we’re measuring our speeds in bytes/second in all client configurations, download windows, and everything in the history of the universe

bits are not bytes

31 Mar 06, 2006 at 23:55 by t_spyrou

Wow, this guide is good :) I was one of those people that did stupid stuff like put an insane value (100,000 to be exact :P) for max connected peers in bitcomet, thinking how fast the downloads would be if I connected to as many people as possible and then wondering why my “bright” idea didn’t work and the speeds were so lame. There’s one thing I’ve got to stress out though: Good as this guide is, you will still need to do some good old trial and error experimentation to get the best out your client. I for example found the guide’s recommendations for max upload speeds and max connected peers a bit optimistic and I had to lower the upload speed a bit and increase the max connected peers a little to get the best out of bitcomet. Took me a whole afternoon to get it right, so don’t expect it to work instantly, but it does work :) Bitcomet is constatly maxing out my connection now, like never before :D:D

32 Mar 07, 2006 at 23:42 by yes

yes

33 Mar 28, 2006 at 09:16 by awesome

Works great. You have to toy around with your own settings, but the basic principles are a great starting guide. Now I upload and download at a much better rate!

34 Apr 14, 2006 at 17:04 by Rilr

The speak easy speed test does the math for you. It test the speed in kbps and does the math to get KB/sec.
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

35 Apr 19, 2006 at 09:27 by adnan

this is fantastic

36 May 10, 2006 at 23:53 by Cincybeck

Guide needs some editing, but not bad. I just wanted to clarify why the capping your upload works the way it does because some one :cough:Craig:cough: doesn’t seem to realise the truth.

OK first off most every ones download speed is faster then their and every one else’s upload speeds. There for when using a torrent it’s easy for your upload pipe to get maxed out. The problem with this is that with TCP/IP protocol when your computer receives a packet of data your computer has to send a receipt packet back to the sender. This packet tells the sending computer that the data packet was received and it can send the next one, BUT if your computer is using all of your upload bandwidth sending packets of data to other leechers your receipt packet doesn’t get sent right away and the sender just waits or worse times-out. Slowing the whole process. Which in turns slows you from becoming a seed instead of a leecher and we all like seeds more then leechers.

37 Jun 12, 2006 at 23:57 by assapopolis

Changed everything you said and I am now downloading AND uploading 10 times faster than before.

THANK YOU!!!!

38 Jun 14, 2006 at 18:07 by Naoto

Getting decent speeds with solid connection!

Great work!

39 Jun 23, 2006 at 04:35 by Merlyn2006

What I dont understand is how my cable pipeline can get maxed trying to start a torrent….

Lets say I just want the 277kb .NFO file for a description of Devil May Cry from eastgame before I download it.

I was connected for 35mins and never got NFO file all it did was max my upload bandwidth which in turn killed my downloads with time-outs.
How can I be uploading at 50KB/s when I havent even got 1kbs of the text file? There were 50 Seeds!(All of which were unconnectable) and 2000 leechers.

Is my computer sending packets to every leecher trying to connect? I checked bandwidth monitor and sure enough my upload speed was maxed but never did get the f*kin NFO file.

Just to let you know I have not had any problem getting torrents for last 3 months but this particular one was weird!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was at 0.0% download kbs but uploading at max of my bandwidth with nothing to upload!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

or other downloads/uploads going on.

What’s the fks the deal?

40 Jul 11, 2006 at 21:57 by Marty

I don’t understand this shit, I may be new to this program but I have also tryed other torrent d/loaders and I seem to get the same lame speeds… I have a red dot staring a hole in my face, I have 12kb/s – 15kb/s…meaning this crap program is going to take up to 4 f*cking weeks to download. I’ve tryed almost everything from forwarding my ports to configuring the prefrences and speed guide and I get shit handed to me… Yet, I see people here thanking others because they seemed to be getting high or decent speeds, so I’m thinking hmmm maybe I should try this also……..Nothing F*cking Happens!!! But wait I guess it’s not all that bad, besides it’s only FOUR M*TH*RF*CKING WEEKS!!

41 Jul 13, 2006 at 23:44 by Weltall

This guide is very very good. I actually saved it in a TXT so I can use it again. I do not know if others have problems but all he says are good and ofcourse if you understand more you can tweak it a lil to match you. I myself left upload speed at 0 (unlimited) because anyway I can’t download faster than what my connection is able to give. I also used TCP Optimizer and EvID4226Patch and finally uTorrent works better. I also wanted to metion Azureus was better for me … it it wasn’t such a memory hog..

42 Jul 29, 2006 at 18:22 by Kevin W

Leeching is just a parasitic term used for Uploading. It means you are leeching out your file while downloading it, aka uploading it to others. It also means you are not seeding it to others so you are only leeching out a part of it.
Sir what do you recommendation regarding the setting of Max Connections Globally, I am curious? I am setting it close to my Max Connections per torrent which is 65, using your equations. Thank you.

43 Jul 31, 2006 at 17:13 by Kotanus

i did all those things but my d/l and u/l speed still hasnt improved :( o well

44 Aug 10, 2006 at 23:51 by johnboy3434

Err… my connection says it goes at 100 Mbps, but the TCP optimizer caps at 20! What should I do?

45 Aug 23, 2006 at 02:05 by Rob Riaa

Yikes! My Ktorrent download speed went from the single digits – teens right up to 60 – 70 -80 kB/s!

46 Sep 10, 2006 at 16:45 by gir

u need to consider wich torrents u download. if it is dead ull end up spending 2 weeks downloading untill 98% cos there are no seeders.
especially with old movies ands stuff.

dude i love ure tips it helped me out a lot.

47 Sep 12, 2006 at 16:59 by basin_data

Can anyone give me the formula to work this problem. Downloading a 5 MB file from the Internet, download speed is 300 kbps, how long will it take to download the files? Show work.

Thank.
basin

48 Oct 05, 2006 at 21:32 by Zeltplatz

Friggin awsom 102 Dowload rate. thank you sooo much

49 Oct 06, 2006 at 14:29 by Markusface

Well i tried this in Bitcomet, no such luck.

Uninstalled it, got uTorrent and set up the whole port forwarding shizz, and wahey!!! Up to 80kB/s d/l :D had to cap my u/l to 25kB/s so I’m just gonna have to leave uTorrent running that little bit longer.

50 Nov 16, 2006 at 05:32 by dammit

can anyone tell me what my upload, download, tcp all those settings should be if my connection is 100mbps.i noticd that my max upload is 55kb/s but i dun know about my max download. can someone tell me whats the best setting? thx in advance

51 Dec 23, 2006 at 21:09 by tcpboy

Ahoy,

achieving great and constant torrent speed based on constant TCP speed first.
There are suggestions in the article about half-open TCP but there are more. And sorry, it needs deeper understanding of TCP, there is no other pill what ease the pain.

Basically a torrent download is group of TCP connections to different machines. This means different “distance” to every connected machine (just for understanding). This “distance” in TCP is measured not in miles but in milliseconds. It is called Round-Trip Time (RTT) or Bandwidth Latency. You can measure your RTT without any expensive equipment, the tool is called ping. Since your connected peers can be anywhere in the world, you should choose some geographically distant servers from abroad to measure your RTT. (And you will be surprised if you just ping your default gateway trough a miss-configured wireless LAN, how large RTT can be even to the way it reaches your ADSL connection.)
RTT is important, the higher the bandwidth of the data flow the same RTT requires more buffer capacity in the low-level TCP operation. Or in another situation there are two servers (torrent seeds) with the same connection speed but their RTT is different, the higher RTT needs larger buffer. This buffer called TCP Receive Window (RWIN). MS opsys is optimised to local LAN, where the RTT is below the 10ms region and small TCP Receive Window is enough even at high speeds. Linux start with 64kB RWIN by default. There can be optimal RWIN between two servers connected over WAN, but there is no optimum for the endless possibilities (speed/RTT) of torrent client machines (no clothes fits for all, no RWIN patch fit for every machine). So with worst case planning we calculate with a connected peer (or webserver) with 500ms delay and its whole troughput as our maximum download. We have for example a 2Mb ADSL line.
2Mbps = 2048kbps=256kBps
This means in every second 256kB of data can be transferred. The 500ms delay is 0,5s so the buffer required is 128kB. So we have to set RWIN size to 128kB.
(128kB is a somewhat good value, for home use the usable values are in the 64-256kB range.)

If we run 4 paralel download with 150 TCP connection each, the overall buffer size is 600×128kB=75MB. If you have a dedicated torrent-machine, it is no problem. But in smaller/older machines this is a massive amount of memory so we have to limit the client side paralel connections or reduce RWIN size 64kB. In uTorrent you can set the overall TCP connections number, in bitcomet you can adjust the number of paralel torrent tasks and the TCP connections for each task. Limiting the overall TCP connections is good anyway, the DSL routers usually cannot handle too much – search the internet about your router TCP handling capacity. Generally the overall TCP connections number should be in the 150-350 region for a general DSL router. So we arrieved back to the question of how-to-configure our bitcomet client to not kill our connection.

Well, the last thing you have to understand is MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit or packet size). The TCP implementation runs on your machine cuts the dataflow into packets. Its size is 1500 by default on windows machines what is the default Ethernet packet size – again fine for your office but not surely the world outside. There are a whole set of different non-ethernet technologies (just think ADSL or cable) outside and even some Cisco technologies like their virtual LAN uses up some space (it adds two bytes to your packet so it will be 1502 large until it comes out from the VLAN). There are exotic MTU lines like satellite connections but we do not count with them now. What happens when the transfer technology has a smaller MTU than your actual packet size? The data is truncated (it is called fragmentation) and a built-in function of TCP is activated, it rebuilds the fragments – but on the costs performance.
It is possible to lower your MTU at your endpoint. Packet headers will be often a bit, but it is better than the fregmentation. Just set the same lower value to ALL of your machines and DSL router, I use 1452 just for sure. In Linux there is an automatic MTU discovery in the kernel for ages so it is not a big deal there.

After all this calculations you can set this parameters (MTU, RWIN) using a free tool called DRTCP.

And a final word, use a linux distro torrent for testing torrent speed, there are usually hosted as whole seeds on large number of machines and even on some servers with excellent connections. uTorrent FAQ gives an example.

Regards,

52 Dec 24, 2006 at 17:00 by tcpboy

Ahoy,

there are free servers for checking the correct TCP configuration. The sw runs on them called Web100 NDT (network diagnostic tool). It is a modified linux kernel, what can send the inner TCP parameters to a java interface for further analisation. You can see the results in a java applet window.

To get correct measured paameters, stop all other internet activities.

Some servers:
Argonne web100, USA
http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/

CERN, Switzerland (yes, the lab where the web was invented)
http://ndt.switch.ch/

NIIFI labs, Hungary
http://rs3.lvs.infotars.hu:7123/

Push the Start button and the communication starts. 20s later the results can be seen pushing the More details button. I copied the intresting part of my results:

“estimate = 39.5 based on packet size = 9Kbits, RTT = 243.37msec, and loss = 1.0E-6
The theoretical network limit is 39.5 Mbps
The NDT server has a 8192.0 KByte buffer which limits the throughput to 262.97 Mbps
Your PC/Workstation has a 255.0 KByte buffer which limits the throughput to 8.21 Mbps
The network based flow control limits the throughput to 0.94 Mbps”

So, RTT is 243ms what is good for a transatlantic link. This server has an enormous 8,2M buffer (!) but on a 10Gbps link it can run only 0,27Gbps (270Mbps) with this RTT.
My 255kB buffer is good on this link upto 8,2Mbps.
There is a network flow limiter somewhere between us, so it limits the speed to 0,94Mbps.

If you make regular measurements and see that your buffer size limits the throughput lower than what you pay for your ISP, try increase the RWIN. But be realistic, as I wrote, for home users the usable RWIN buffer size is in the 64kB-256kB region.

Regards,

53 Dec 24, 2006 at 23:08 by Ernesto

thanks for the comments TCPboy!

54 Jan 15, 2007 at 16:55 by Jord

Was sceptical at first but using your formulas as a guide-line i tweaked with my connection speeds and saw an instant improvement. Thanks alot

55 Mar 22, 2007 at 05:50 by joe morgan

i have a question about uploading. if i upload a lot will it increase my downlaod rate and in way?

56 Mar 22, 2007 at 05:51 by joe morgan

i meant in any way***

57 Mar 22, 2007 at 21:59 by mitch

i use bitlord is der anyway 2 get beter speeds on dat
am only getin dload speeds of 8k/bs

58 Apr 10, 2007 at 16:26 by GeneralTrue

Sharing is indeed very important but i rather go for the download speed cause uhm well.. mabye CAUSE I`M DOWNLOADING SOMETHING? HELLLLLLLLL..

59 May 12, 2007 at 05:46 by braden

Ok i need help if someone could configure everything for me becuase it still won’t work it would be apprectiated i have a download speed of 4017kb and an upload of 412kb

60 Jun 03, 2007 at 21:11 by ang

have my download and upload set on no limit but downloading torrents very slow sometimes can take 2 days what should i have them set on new to all this

61 Sep 05, 2007 at 21:18 by none

i always just set my upload to half of what it is untill iv finished downloading then put it up untill seeded 1:1 seems to work fine so for those that are to lazy to do math just cap the upload speed at half of what it is, so 40kbps set it too 20kbps untill you have 100% of the file then bummp it up

62 Oct 16, 2007 at 07:13 by taltos

just follow the formula it will boost your download significantly after you finish – remove the cap in upload speed to maintain your ratio

63 Dec 04, 2007 at 02:39 by Mr. Math

[quote comment="12089"]Can anyone give me the formula to work this problem. Downloading a 5 MB file from the Internet, download speed is 300 kbps, how long will it take to download the files? Show work.

Thank.
basin[/quote]

(5*1024)(1/(300/8))
result in seconds

64 Dec 06, 2007 at 08:32 by Anonymous

Good but fucks!!!!!!!!!

65 Dec 19, 2007 at 02:19 by the magic pigeon

My speed doubled thanks to this ^^

66 Dec 31, 2007 at 23:17 by ratogames

Isso é uma palhaçada!

67 Jan 17, 2008 at 03:40 by teddy

I’ve got good speed on the strongvpn.com. Hope it will help…

68 Feb 02, 2008 at 13:27 by mclovin'

Thank you so much for these tips!

I had manually set the bandwidth previously but still experienced abysmal speeds.

Once I switched the default ports my speeds jumped from 7.5 kiB down & 3.5 kiB up to 125 kiB down 45 kiB up.

ISP throttling ftl :(

69 Feb 05, 2008 at 21:19 by Rich

Whoa..I saw that date was Feb 5th and thought this was posted today (seeing how today is Feb 5th) little did I know its 2 years later..

70 Mar 06, 2008 at 03:42 by ObscureLight

The TCPOptimzer is a very bad tool when i used it, it reduced my dl speed by half when i took the test good thing it creates backups that i used

71 Mar 22, 2008 at 07:11 by Ferchu

You are a genius Ernesto, you solved my torrent problems :D. Thanks so much

72 Mar 31, 2008 at 19:13 by Meghiddo

this works much better for me:

http://infinite-source.de/az/az-calc.html

73 Apr 18, 2008 at 12:49 by Secret...

hi guys, have anyone experienced super download rate? Coz i have. I even experienced up to 7 megabytes per second maximum download on the internet cafe. I was experimenting on bittorrent trying to convince myself that its a good downloader. I tweaked the settings to something like near to maximum and others unlimited. I don’t exactly remember the things i did. All i remember is that i was downloading 5 movies each with 700 megabytes. I saw on the screen like this… Transformers download speed 7mbps, shrek 726kbps, the 3rd 1mbps, the 4th 3mbps, the 5th 200kbps… I can’t even believe my eyes. However the computer was telling me that the virtual memory was low and it kept on closing the client and when i opened the internet explorer, the system crashes and other computers were suffering very very low internet connection and its like they cant connect anymore. Does anyone have any idea what i did that time cause i wanna do it again but i cant. Hehehe… Just post it here thanks. By the way, that was the fastest connection i’ve ever experienced. I was downloading like crazy like it was just an mp3 file. Hahayz. I really want to do it again…

74 Apr 19, 2008 at 18:55 by ninjamax

i have a decent download speed aprox 600kbs maxed out, but my uploads never break 50kbs. This makes maintaining a respectable ratio difficult. My port is forwarded and speed tests have me at 5000kbs download and only 350kbs upload. Given the results of my speed tests does it seem that there is a problem here or is there room to optimize? I really dont care if i can make my downloads faster – I NEED FASTER UPLOADS.

75 Jun 30, 2008 at 00:25 by me and my inner voices

to the author of the above article:

thanks for the advises – i´ve tried it and it improoved my download speed immedeately !

greeting
zeroKool

Responses are closed

All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.