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Getting shitty speeds? Here's how to fix it!
There are three reasons you get low speeds on bittorrent. One is that you're using crappy public torrents with a 1:20 seeder to leech ratio. If this is the issue, get membership to some good private sites, or only download better seeded public torrents. The second is that you haven't got your ports forwarded. If this is the problem, read Portforward and change your router settings to forward the ports you use. Which, whilst I'm on the subject, shouldn't be the default 6881.
The third problem is traffic shaping. This is where your ISP monitors outgoing traffic, and throttles it if it thinks it's P2P. ISPs do this for several reasons, primary amongst which is to minimise the bandwidth being used by their subscribers. ISPs pay per GB for their peering connections and/or backbone connections, so if you're pulling down 500GB a month, they're probably turning a loss on your account.
Up until now, traffic shaping has been more or less impossible to circumvent, unless you had a remote shell account somewhere, and let's face it, few people do! But that's all changed. The developers of µTorrent & Azureus have recently implemented protocol encryption (PE) into the latest versions of their clients. This obscures the P2P nature of your traffic, allowing it to travel unimpeeded. And is it ever effective. I'm with an ISP that throttles during the day, but gives unlimited bandwidth at night. Every evening, a bit after midnight, my download speed jumps from a throttled 60kB/s, to a full line speed 200kB/s. Now, after starting µTorrent's PE feature, I'm getting 200k constantly. Others, behind stricter traffic shapers, have reported jumps from 3k to line speed of 800k.
Furthermore, even if your connection isn't shaped, you can improve its speed by applying PE, as it allows peers who are behind shapers to connect to you at full speed. And even if you're already getting line speed on your connection, you can just enable this to help your fellow pirates. Here's how.
Upgrade to either the latest version of azureus, or better yet, as it's got all the same features but isn't a huge resource whore, the latest µTorrent beta (PE is not in v1.4). For azureus, read this. For µTorrent open Preferences, click the network tab, and select "Enabled" on the protocol encryption drop down menu. I sincerely hope you enjoy all the extra warez this will allow you to download. I encourage you to copy this post to all your favourite bittorrent forums & trackers, for the good of the community at large.
nb. BitComet uses its own version of PE, that is incompatible with the one µTorrent and Azureus use (which does work between those two clients). Also, BC is banned from many of the best sites, whereas Azureus and µTorrent are welcome everywhere.
There are three reasons you get low speeds on bittorrent. One is that you're using crappy public torrents with a 1:20 seeder to leech ratio. If this is the issue, get membership to some good private sites, or only download better seeded public torrents. The second is that you haven't got your ports forwarded. If this is the problem, read Portforward and change your router settings to forward the ports you use. Which, whilst I'm on the subject, shouldn't be the default 6881.
The third problem is traffic shaping. This is where your ISP monitors outgoing traffic, and throttles it if it thinks it's P2P. ISPs do this for several reasons, primary amongst which is to minimise the bandwidth being used by their subscribers. ISPs pay per GB for their peering connections and/or backbone connections, so if you're pulling down 500GB a month, they're probably turning a loss on your account.
Up until now, traffic shaping has been more or less impossible to circumvent, unless you had a remote shell account somewhere, and let's face it, few people do! But that's all changed. The developers of µTorrent & Azureus have recently implemented protocol encryption (PE) into the latest versions of their clients. This obscures the P2P nature of your traffic, allowing it to travel unimpeeded. And is it ever effective. I'm with an ISP that throttles during the day, but gives unlimited bandwidth at night. Every evening, a bit after midnight, my download speed jumps from a throttled 60kB/s, to a full line speed 200kB/s. Now, after starting µTorrent's PE feature, I'm getting 200k constantly. Others, behind stricter traffic shapers, have reported jumps from 3k to line speed of 800k.
Furthermore, even if your connection isn't shaped, you can improve its speed by applying PE, as it allows peers who are behind shapers to connect to you at full speed. And even if you're already getting line speed on your connection, you can just enable this to help your fellow pirates. Here's how.
Upgrade to either the latest version of azureus, or better yet, as it's got all the same features but isn't a huge resource whore, the latest µTorrent beta (PE is not in v1.4). For azureus, read this. For µTorrent open Preferences, click the network tab, and select "Enabled" on the protocol encryption drop down menu. I sincerely hope you enjoy all the extra warez this will allow you to download. I encourage you to copy this post to all your favourite bittorrent forums & trackers, for the good of the community at large.
nb. BitComet uses its own version of PE, that is incompatible with the one µTorrent and Azureus use (which does work between those two clients). Also, BC is banned from many of the best sites, whereas Azureus and µTorrent are welcome everywhere.