iMac and Fios and torrents

[Sorkvild]

Hi, I've got an Intel iMac, 20'' 2.4 Ghz with Verizon Fios and everything is fine except torrents. I use Transmission and the torrent has many seeders, like ~50. Transmission says the port is open but speeds are still incredibly slow, it averages at about 50kb/sec. I tried port forwarding on the router but that didn't make any difference, the only thing that made it increase slightly was to use the DMZ setting. Other intensive things like loading 1080p movies from apple.com is fast, it's just bittorrents.

Other posts here talk about having problems with Fios. Does anyone know what the deal is? Thanks!

 

[arn]

It's not necessarily a problem with Fios. By the nature of Bittorrent you are reliant on the upstream from other people. So if 10 people only upload at 1K/s, you'll only get 10K/s down. Besides that, you can only get parts from people who have different parts than you.

I'm not familiar with the details of the protocol, but you can try increasing your upstream and see if that helps somehow. not sure if there's some sort of reciprical reward system in bittorrent... where if u seed someone more, they will seed u back.

arn

 

[Fearless Leader]

Whats a speed test from a bandwidth tester give you? I'm just curious so I can crap myself. 50 isn't big, Just download some random torrent with a couple 1000 seeders and you'll see some speed. You might want to check your settings, they may be limiting.

and shields up from grc.com can check ports for you from an outside world view.

 

[Sorkvild]

Thanks for the replies. I tried the same torrent file on another Mac with a cable connection, same OS (10.5.2), and same version of Transmission. I was connected to about 40 peers and download speed was nearly 300kb/sec
I have yet to do a speed test on the iMac. Thanks.

 

[DukeofAnkh]

I found Transmission to be pretty crappy as a torrent client. It doesn't play nice with a lot of torrent trackers, so speeds aren't as high as they would be on windows.

Personally, I use BitRocket, which gives me good speeds with minimal overhead. Unfortunately it's still in beta so it's on the temperamental side (crashes every now and then), but I found that if you pause all torrents before quitting, then resume when you open again, it mostly works well. For speeds, I found Transmission to be crud in comparison. About the only thing it has on it's side is stability. I'll take speed any day.

 

[Fearless Leader]

Azures (well vuze or something now) is what i use for the stubborn and slow torrents. Sure its a big clunky java program but it has so many options for downloading I find it really nice.

most torrents I use Transmission. Lightweight and fast.

 

[manley]

I have found that I cannot seed any torrents on my Macbook with FIOS. I currently use Transmission and Portforwarding.com does not have a tutorial for that program. My upload ratio sucks due to this.

Any suggestions?