BitTorrent is a protocol for transferring files from peer-to-peer (P2P). There are lots of different uses for this technology but the best part is you are able to take some small parts of the file from many different people to reduce the bandwidth limit of one person uploading the file (seeder). When you are downloading your files there are a few things you can do to increase your download speed.
I use utorrent as my client, so if some of these options do not apply to your client, I am sorry.
1. First you want to go into the preferences and change the port that you use for torrents since some ISP’s will limit these ports. So under Options>Preferences you will see a window that has connection on the left. On the right it will say “Port used for incoming connections”. Change this port to something else. Don’t use a number under 1024 as this is usually used by other programs. You can use anything from 20000 to 60000. Also on this page you want to make sure “Enable UPnP port mapping”, “Enable NAT-PMP port mapping” and “Add uTorrent to Windows Firewall exceptions” are checked.
2. The best thing you can do to increase your speed is to have your router correctly port forwarding. This process is different across multiple routers. The best source of doing this is through http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm. This Web site provides detail information on how to port forward your router based on the router you have.
3. Now that that is set you want to check that you dont have any issues with your port forwarding. In uTorrent go to Options > Speed Guide and click on Test if ports are forwarded correctly. Hopefully everything is set correctly otherwise go back and double check your settings.
4. A nice feature of windows XP is that they want to make sure your computer is safe. Unfortunately for torrents this means that they limit the number of connections that you can have. There is a patch for windows XP and Vista that will change this limitation. I would suggest you use a number like 100 for it.
XP PATCH.
VISTA PATCH.
5. The next option you want to set it so make sure your upload and download speeds are set correctly. Setting your upload speed too high or low will severely limit your download speed. First thing you want to test your internet connection speed. There are a large number of websites you can use to test your internet connection speed and they have a large number of test servers. Now in uTorrent you are going to go to Options > Preferences. Click on Connection on the left. On this screen towards the bottom it will say Maximum upload rate (kB/s): For this conversion you need to divide the number you got from the speed test by 8. This gave me a limit of 147kilobytes. I only place 30% of that into the global upload rate as the upload is really more of a burst rather than an average. Then under Maximum download rate I divide by 8 and put 90% of that in download max.
6. As I mentioned earlier some ISP’s block BitTorrent traffic so there is an option to encrypt the communication so that it is harder for your ISP to detect your BitTorrent communication. This is done by going to Options > Preferences > BitTorrent. Then where it says Protocol Encryption make sure it says Enabled.
7. Also on the same connection page there is a Global Maximum number of connections. This you can set to a number that your router can handle. I have a Linksys loaded with DD-WRT so I am able to make my max connections to 4000 but you don’t want to max this out or your wont be able to do anything else on the internet. I would increase it slowly up to about 500. Under that there is an option for Maximum number of connected peers per torrent. I would put this to 75.
There are a few other tricks you can do to ensure that your BitTorrent experience goes better than average.
1. I would use peer guardian to block connections to peoples who may be trying to look at what you are downloading. This is only compatible with XP at the time of writing this.
2. There are a ton of private trackers out there that make your browsing experience much more private and generally faster. There is a utility which you can use to check multiple websites to see if their trackers are open for registration since this is usually limited.
3. There is also a very nice feature of uTorrent that allows you to use a web interface in their FAQ so that you can access your torrents when you are not at home. This does require you setting up a domain to your computer but in my opinion it is worth it and fun to do.
