Speed up your torrents

Written by Ernesto on November 30, 2005

Help! 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…

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244 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)

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201 Oct 29, 2007 at 17:59 by azureus

i thought this ment to be about aZureus cause i need some help

202 Oct 30, 2007 at 19:29 by breath

“your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10″

This is wrong XP doesnt limit ur tcp connections to 10, XP (from SP2) limits your Half-Open TCP connections to 10 (half-open TCP connections and TCP connections are 2 different things, search on wikipedia for a nice explanation), having this limit can reduce your P2P performance but its not always the case check if you have a lot of 4226 events in the Event Viewer (control pannel->administrative tools->eventviewer->system) if u have a lot of 4226 events(a lot per day, this means having 1 of those events per day isnt rly a problem) then: 1. u have a spyware, scan and search it; or 2. ur P2P activity is being limited by this limit and u need to apply the fix

203 Nov 12, 2007 at 13:47 by a7med-at-large

please help me. when i open the patcher,it says cannot execute. 64-bit. please help

204 Nov 23, 2007 at 17:25 by LuloMAn

hey, my utorrent used to download at a max 150 kb/s , i dont know why but it suddenly went down to 30!!!

i dont know how to fix this, help!

205 Dec 05, 2007 at 03:18 by Anonymous

[quote comment="221870"]hey, my utorrent used to download at a max 150 kb/s , i dont know why but it suddenly went down to 30!!!

i dont know how to fix this, help![/quote]
Dude you are sith sympatico… if yes we have the same problem it juste started a month ago

206 Dec 08, 2007 at 13:54 by Dub

Ditto on the Sympatico thing…

207 Dec 08, 2007 at 17:46 by reurigoobby

I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting!

208 Dec 13, 2007 at 03:05 by Zerty

You are a god among mere mortals

209 Dec 17, 2007 at 21:23 by reurigoobby

I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links:

210 Dec 28, 2007 at 18:44 by vino

started fresh to torrent.iam verymuch confused to use this programe.and it is dam slow.help me please

211 Jan 16, 2008 at 16:19 by Tim

Can any1 tell me how to increase dwnload speed of bitlord pro….

212 Jan 17, 2008 at 03:28 by bitwolf

I’m using the VPN service to speed up my download speeds. Cause of encryption it’s a little bit more traffic, but i enjoy it truly. - http://www.strongvpn.com, not the traffic but the speed

213 Jan 17, 2008 at 03:37 by bitwolf

using the VPN service is going to be the easiest way of speeding up the torrents. Also on the http://www.strongvpn.com I’ve got the static ip. Hope it will help u ;)

214 Jan 17, 2008 at 03:38 by bitwolf

am i did all that posts? time to go sleep

215 Jan 18, 2008 at 13:38 by cameron

have dial up and i am in australia using utorrent and wondering how to speed the download process up i have no firewall and cant download any faster than 4kb/s i have altered some setting that has improved things slightly just wondering if anyone can give me the settings that they may be using with dial up and getting better speeds

216 Jan 22, 2008 at 13:33 by luq

thanks for the tips..i’ll try em out..anywayy i guess my isp was ryt in terms of upload speeds :)

217 Jan 31, 2008 at 02:10 by Yatti

PeerGuardian 2 :) …

218 Jan 31, 2008 at 15:13 by BG

People,some of you may not benefit from this because of your ISP,some ISP(s) slow down p2p programs,this is known as throttling.To see whether you ISP throttles p2p programs,type in your isp name into wikipedia.Thanks!

219 Feb 09, 2008 at 22:45 by yehhanyos2006

how i know my (isp) name ?

220 Feb 16, 2008 at 07:11 by Rishidevdas

Can anyone help me to decide which of the torrent downloader version is better for a movie downloader….
Well i would also like to say that can anybody provide me a way to log into http://www.desitorrents.com , they r not allowin new members 2 join now a days,,,,,,,,,,……….

rishidevdas@yahoo.co.in

221 Feb 26, 2008 at 22:23 by James Wallace

I just downloaded the patch and now my internet isn’t working properly. Can anyone tell me how to reverse the patch because it is really peeing me off now

222 Mar 04, 2008 at 06:37 by DISFIGURED

[quote comment="55559"]HELPFUL TIP: REALLY HELPS!!!! Try gradually incresing your upload speed until you get the highest donwload rate, when it starts going down back up a little, it helped me, i had upload to 35KB/s and was downloading at 29KB/s now i set upload to 60KB/s and am getting 100KB/s download! TRY! do not limit upload speeds. increase until its optimized =D[/quote]

Well it’s no joke…..it helped me big…..no my stuff its toppin out at 130kB/s….thanks a lot man…..

223 Mar 09, 2008 at 14:19 by Alex

I applied the patch and followed these tweaks and only saw a small improvement.

Then i found another.

In advanced settings, Try changing the peer.disconnect_inactive_interval from 300 to 600 and the peer.lazy_bitfield to FALSE.

My download instantly jumped from 25kB up to 120kB.
Thanks for all the tips guys. Torrents are much more bearable now!

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