I?m here to try to put some know-how of bit torrent into your minds to try to help you explain all of your problems with bit torrent and your speeds. For this demonstration, I will use Azureus.
As many of you are aware of, bit torrent is a file sharing program that allows you to ?share? files with others. Now this is very important to remember since this is what decides your speeds and nothing else. Those who have the file you want would be labeled ?seeds?. There will be ?in swarm? in parenthesis, but to my knowledge it has nothing to do with your speed. The thing that matters here is how many seeds there are. The more seeds you have, then the faster your speeds will be. There is NOTHING you can do about that. I can?t stress that enough, if there are little to no seeds then all you can do is wait until a person who has the file finished comes on or wait until a person finishes downloading the file. New files tend to be the hardest to download at full speed. Here a picture to try to explain it better:
Some things to remember:
1. You don?t need to forward your ports just to get faster speeds. I personally tried and all it did was screw up my other computer (which is connected wirelessly). You only really need to forward your ports if you health smile face (in Azureus) is not showing green after 15-20 minutes.
2. Make sure your ports are not the original ports. (for Azureus, the original ports are 6881-6889. Try something like in the late 40,000 to 55,000. This can be found under Toos>Options>Connection>Incoming TCP listen port) Personally I even got really good speeds at very low port numbers such as 49). Something like this:
3. ?Peers? are those who are trying to download the file and also have nothing to do with your speeds. They might bring down your speed since your all trying to download off of the same people (and if you have not a lot of peers than this might cause a problem. If there are more than 50 peers than your all set).
4. Setting both your upload and download speed to unlimited (can be done by accessing it under Tools>Options>Transfer>first two boxes set to 0) is sometimes a good deal because it will allow your speed to increase and get the best speeds it can.
5. Try torrent "communities". These are sites that allow you to download files from users on that site. Just try a google search.
Some of the more popular torrent "communities" that I use are (registration is required):
6. Be patient, your downloads don?t start at over 100 kb/s, let it stay for a while and check back. Keep updating your tracker also. Usually your downloads start at 1.5 kb/s then increase over time.
For those that want to know what my pc (actually downloading files using my laptop) specs are then these are what they are:
HP 5000zx
Pentium 4 3.20 w/ HT
40 GB hard drive w/ 120 GB external
128 mb video card (Radeon 9700)
54 b/g wireless internal card
Windows XP SP2
And even with the built in firewall on Windows XP SP2 I have no problems with getting good speeds. All of this is from my personal experience and this is a picture to show that fast speeds can and will happen if you followed my advice:
