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BitTorrent speeds - yet again

allan_zip

allan_zip

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 25, 2005
151
0
Belfast, N. Ireland
BitTorrent speeds wtf is the deal.
I can find no useful info on this forum that has upped my speeds in anyway. I have tried BitTorrent OSX client, Bits on wheels and Azureus (which i have stuck with). My firewall is off, i do not have a router and i have a 256k line that gives me 34Kb/s on regular downloads from sites or ftp. I cannot seem to get above these speeds when downloading in a torrent and this is on Dimeadozen where there are plenty of seeds in the swarm and people are pretty cool about keeping their ports forwarded. I have tweaked endlessly with settings in Azureus (port numbers, upload speeds, slots etc...) all to no avail and don't mind admitting that i'm starting to get pretty jealous of seeing average d/load speeds of 200 kb/s while i crawl around at 24 and worse. Someone must know something that can help... please.
:confused:
 
allan_zip said:
BitTorrent speeds wtf is the deal.
I can find no useful info on this forum that has upped my speeds in anyway. I have tried BitTorrent OSX client, Bits on wheels and Azureus (which i have stuck with). My firewall is off, i do not have a router and i have a 256k line that gives me 34Kb/s on regular downloads from sites or ftp. I cannot seem to get above these speeds when downloading in a torrent and this is on Dimeadozen where there are plenty of seeds in the swarm and people are pretty cool about keeping their ports forwarded. I have tweaked endlessly with settings in Azureus (port numbers, upload speeds, slots etc...) all to no avail and don't mind admitting that i'm starting to get pretty jealous of seeing average d/load speeds of 200 kb/s while i crawl around at 24 and worse. Someone must know something that can help... please.
:confused:
Click to expand...

try a different site. try downloading the This Week In Tech podcast or something.. about 20 megs and available via a torrent. www.twit.tv

even with my ports closed i download at 400-500k/sec here... :p (haven't switched my new router over yet to open ports... vonage.. weee)

i'll think some more and see what i can come up with. that port forwarding stuff is typically only for uploading... set your "max" connections higher maybe for downloads?
 
Dang!
Those TWIT torrents came up a total blank. Their latest podcasts had 0 seeds and 0 peers! I've already tried setting more upload slots and increasing my upload speed (and vice versa) but i was still stuck in the twenties! As a speed test I recently tried "the worlds largest tracker" to see if i could get high speeds on some high brow hollywood blockbuster, but even with something like 400 peers i was getting really low speeds (10 kb/s). I'm down to hoping there's a magic switch somewhere inside Azureus that i'll activate and >>> off i'll go!
 
What are your upload speeds like?

There is something with my router / cable modem that kills my download speeds once the upload exceeds about 8kbps. Granted, low upload speeds are not great for the bittorrent network, and it'll cause some clients to not send you as much, BUT it might help your overall speeds.
 
allan_zip said:
i have a 256k line ... i'm starting to get pretty jealous of seeing average d/load speeds of 200 kb/s while i crawl around at 24 and worse.
Click to expand...

First of all, there is no way that you'll get 200 kilobytes/second on a 256 kilobits/second line. 200 kilobytes/second is about 1.5 megabits/second.

I suspect that you're mixing up bits and bytes. ISPs etc sell their connections in bits, while most download apps report the speed in bytes. Multiply the number of bytes by 8 to get the number of bits.
 
Where do you live? I've found at school (in Montreal) I would get insanely fast speeds, when at home (in Brockville) I often crawl. Montreal's population is well over a million, and Brockville's is 22 000. I've often associated the two together. Closer the peers and number of the peers, the faster you're going to downloaded. Also, uploading a lot can help, but it doesn't always.
 
Low upload speeds will generally limit your download speed. Also, with a 256 kbps connection (really slow nowadays), you can't expect to get much above 30 kB/s, and probably will rarely reach that. I have a 1.5 Mbps down/856 kbps up DSL connection, and I rarely get over about 140 kB/s with BitTorrent. Also, some torrents are faster than others. The number of peers, and the number of seeders has a huge effect on torrent speeds.
 
Interesting replies. I know the difference between bits and bytes but had always been under the impression that my bandwith wouldn't affect the limit on my Torrent download speeds, i thought BitTorrent was intended to provide faster download speeds despite bandwidth limitations. I have NEVER passed my standard 34kb/s on a torrent download, surely there is a problem in that, i would even feel good about getting something like 60kb/s on a well seeded torrent but that just never happens. Intersting point made about upload speeds, i always set it to the recommended 2/3rds of my set bandwidth at about 20kb/s and have even set it lower and higher on tests to see what happens with no great results. My uploads are usually always a lot slower which makes keeping my share ratio up a real slog. I've been reading about ISP capped download speeds and 'choked' port numbers in a number of posts, i have an NTL connection, anybody in the UK have a line that compares?
 
Your download speed will never exceed 256; that's your upper limit. BT is meant to overcome bandwidth problems by allow peers to send data between themselves and not all use the limited bandwidth of the server. This equates to the transfer of data being efficient and collectively the peers will receive the file faster than they would have with a single server, but in no way means you are going to exceed the service for which you are paying.
 
I knew BT bypassed the bandwidth limitations of the server for the host of the torrent file allowing users to dload amongst themselves rather than from one location. Maybe i've had this program wrong all along and those people with blazing dloads have blazing connections anyway. It's weird, if i'm on ssX and am dloading from multiple hosts with fast connections i can get, for example, 20kb/s from three seperate sharers with a total download rate of 60 kb/s even whilst someone else is uploading from me, at say, 10 kb/s ?! I thought BT would work something like this too, allowing users with slow connections to benefit from the upload speeds of people with really fast connections.
 
allan_zip said:
for example, 20kb/s from three seperate sharers with a total download rate of 60 kb/s even whilst someone else is uploading from me, at say, 10 kb/s ?! I thought BT would work something like this too, allowing users with slow connections to benefit from the upload speeds of people with really fast connections.
Click to expand...

That scenario would be possible, but you'd need a 512 line to get 60k/sec. I get a max of 57.7k.
 
On your connection, you might want to set the number of connections per torrent fairly low, say around 4 - 6. If you try to connect to too many peers, all your bandwidth will be sucked up trying to keep those connections alive than actually downloading content. I keep my connections per torrent at 8 since I am on a 1.5Mb/s connection. But if I am running 5 or more torrents, I set my connections per torrent to something like 4 or 5 so my bandwidth doesn't get hosed.
 
I only ever run 1 torrent at a time. with the speeds i'm getting it wouldnt be worth the time doing anymore. I usually keep my upload slots at 2 and as i mentioned i have shifted the speeds for those slots to anything from 6kb/s to 24kb/s with little difference in my dload performance.

Can i ask, has anyone ever passed their max dload speed capability on a torrent or does everyone stay under their limit?
 
allan_zip said:
I only ever run 1 torrent at a time. with the speeds i'm getting it wouldnt be worth the time doing anymore. I usually keep my upload slots at 2 and as i mentioned i have shifted the speeds for those slots to anything from 6kb/s to 24kb/s with little difference in my dload performance.

Can i ask, has anyone ever passed their max dload speed capability on a torrent or does everyone stay under their limit?
Click to expand...

It's simply not possible to go faster than the pipe unless some compression is involved (which it's not). You may appear to see 3x 20kBs (please use large B for bytes otherwise it's really confusing) but this is probably the client failing to refresh the screen fast enough! For an accurate indication of what your Mac is receiving use Activity Monitor. This shows the total network IO on your Mac. I have a 2Mpbs link and I rarely manage to get above 80kBps on a single torrent even though the link is capable of somewhere around 250kBps (multiple torrents is another matter).
 
I'm just now seeing this topic and I'm just wondering... my Mac is coming in a few days, but I've been using BitTorrent for quite some time... is just switching to Mac going to affect how fast my downloads and uploads run, or as long as I have the same internet connection, will I still have the same speeds?

Daniel
 
BurtonCCC said:
I'm just now seeing this topic and I'm just wondering... my Mac is coming in a few days, but I've been using BitTorrent for quite some time... is just switching to Mac going to affect how fast my downloads and uploads run, or as long as I have the same internet connection, will I still have the same speeds?

Daniel
Click to expand...

To be honest with you, I hadn't used BitTorrent before I switched to Mac, and I've never used it under Windows, but I would assume you'll get approximately the same speeds. I have used BT on Linux, and got roughly the same speeds as on my Mac (ie. up to 150 kB/s downloads on my ~1.2 Mb/s real-world connection).
 
robbieduncan said:
I have a 2Mpbs link and I rarely manage to get above 80kBps on a single torrent
Click to expand...

Interesting, I have a 2 Mb/s connection too, and often get over 200 kB/s (sometimes as high as 240, which is almost the theoretical limit!)
 
Nermal said:
Interesting, I have a 2 Mb/s connection too, and often get over 200 kB/s (sometimes as high as 240, which is almost the theoretical limit!)
Click to expand...

I think this is down to the torrents in question. On the very popular torrents with a large number of high bandwidth seeds it's not a problem. On the less popular (or in many cases simply older) torrents there are often not enough seeds to get this sort of speed.
 
Don't know if you knew but NTL are freely upgrading their broadband speeds, and sneaking in download limits.

I believe the one your on is 300k? You have the option to "upgrade" to 1mbit, with a 1 GB monthly limit.. which is pointless. You can stay at the speed your currently at and your limit is 30 GB a month.

I just upgraded my 750k account to 2mbit, with 200k upload. Awesome :). This is the fourth time they've upgraded me for free (500k->650k->750k->2mbit!) so i'm not complaining.. well i do have complaints about upload speed, but thats irrelivant :)

Like many other people mentioned, if you dont have great upload speeds your download speed may be affected.
 
Yeah my upload speeds are always about a third of my downloads, sometimes worse, which means keeping my share ratio up is a real slog. NTL upgraded my original 128k line to my current 256 for free about a year ago. I dont fancy a download limit on my account at all so i'm not sure where to go for a good deal.
 
This is slightly OT, so my apologies first...

Do any of you have issues with using BT over an Airport network? There are times when all of my downloads just stop and the airport freezes up. The only way that I have found to fix the problem is to reboot my Airport. The only thing I can think of is that my IP address changed (I use SBC DSL and I have a dynamic IP). Would a changing IP address really cause eveything to lock up like this?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

-- Ben
 
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