Speed up your torrent downloads

I´am not using bittorrent that often anymore but it is still a great way of transfering large files. You see less complaints of people about low download speeds but certainly there are some that are having troubles downloading at a great speed. This can be of course torrent related, if you don´t have many seeders or only seeders with low upload speeds you will experience a slow download.

There are still some settings that are worth tweaking to make sure that the settings from your side are perfect for full speed if the torrent provides that speed. Optimize your bittorrent download speed explains not only basic settings but also advanced ones that help improve the download speed. The article not only provides the numbers but explains them and the reasoning behind. This is great. Let us take a look at the parameters:

Max Half open Tcp Connections: You probably need to apply a patch to windows xp service pack 2  because windows xp sp2 limits the number of halp open tcp connections to 10. Suggest is a number between 50 and 100.

Maximum Upload Speed: If no one seeds no one will recieve files. If everyone sets his upload speed to a minimum downloads will be slow. Set this to a reasonable level, suggested is 80%. Some sites force you to keep a good ratio if you want to download torrents from their sites, if your ratio drops below a certain level you will not be able to download at all. Suggested setting is 80% of your maximum upload speed. I´am recieving good results with 50% as well.

Maximum Download Speed: If you don´t need some bandwidth for other activities on your computer or have enough you can leave this at maximum speed. Use a lower figure if you want to do something besides downloading. (Surfing, chatting). Suggested between 80% - 100%

Maximum connected peers per torrent: I have no experience with the setting, the article suggests a figure of your upload speed * 1.3 which would mean for a speed of 50K that the maximum connected peers per torrent would be set to 50 * 1.3 = 65

Maximum Upload Slots: Suggest value is 1 + ( upload speed / 6). Means for our 50k upload speed example it would be 9.

The article offers a few more tips that might improve your speeds. Some ISPs throttle torrent traffic, two methods to avoid this would be to change the default ports that bittorrent uses and to encrypt your torrent traffic.