If you search the internet for tips to improve your download speeds with bittorrent clients such as Azureus and uTorrent you do find many tips that have one thing in common, all suggest different settings for maximum performance. There are several things that can influence download speeds in bittorrent including bad Seeds to Peer ratio and firewall settings. I would only change settings in my bittorrent client if I thought that my download speeds would be really bad, say 2K with a torrent that has 10+ seeders.
One way to check your settings would be to use a calculator that would output good settings for your connection type. Those settings are close to optimal for Bittorrent then and should work fine for most users. The Azureus U/L settings calculator needs only your upload speed and calculates everything else automatically. It recommends maximum upload and download speed, maximum upload slots and the maximum number of connections per torrents and globally.
Last but not least it suggests settings for maximum active torrents and maximum simultaneous connections. Although the calculator has been designed with Azureus in mind it can be used for other Bittorrent clients as well. The settings are almost identical and it should not pose a problem to change them in your client of choice.
The most important setting is of course the global upload speed that you define in your bittorrent client. If you set it to high your download speed and other activities on the web might suffer. You should not set it to low on the other hand because most clients reward uploaders and the system at all would not work if everyone would set the upload speed to a minimum, Remember you can’t download if others do not upload.
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I havent used any torrent clients in awhile but with all this crap the RIAA is doing here in the US I think I will be looking into it again. I listen to Pandora all day long and its probably going to be shut down due to licensing fees imposed by the RIAA.
Oh well, when that day comes I will come her first to polish up on my torrent skills.
You can find some good tutorial at the bottom of this post
http://torrentfreak.com/calculate-your-optimal-bittorrent-settings/
which was probably the inspiration of this post anyway.
By the way, the giganews recommendation with a referral link doesn’t look very objective to me, at least tell people it is advertising.