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BitTorrent - why bother?

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Carol Haynes:
I have to confess my experiences with BitTorrent speeds are very poor. So much so that I stopped bothering for a while.

Today I decided to download a Linux Distro which was available in the form of 5 CD ISOs or a single DVD ISO. The DVD is only available via BitTorrent so I thought I'd try again.

It is so frustrating as I don't seem to be able to get speeds consistently above 10K/sec, and most of the time it is <5K/sec (current estimated download time is >100 hours), whereas when I download the CD ISOs in the normal way I am getting download speeds of 120K/sec and higher.

There seem to be lots of peers available in my list for the DVD download and 23/25 of them have 100% of the file. I have my client set to share files too so I am providing upload as well.

Why do people rate BT technology so highly? Is it just me having this crap experience?

moerl:
When I download torrents, I use Azureus, and my speeds are great most of the time, because I follow some simple rules. If you want torrents to download quickly, you need to get HEALTHY torrents. To go Torrentspy.com, (one of the better torrent search engines out there), and search for your file. It is going to show you each torrent's health status on the right, with bars. Torrent health is an over-arching term for a few factors, like tracker status, ratio between leechers/seeders, etc. And then you also have to make sure you have no NAT in your network. Do you use a router? A software firewall? Do you use the router's firewall? You have to make sure your BT client has a listening pot dedicated to it, and that it's open. Torrents may work if this is not the case, but they will be much slower.

Good BT experience = Good BT client with correct client and network settings + Healthy Torrents

I cannot stress enough how important the latter is. People think all torrents are the same. And people couldn't be farther from the truth. Here's a quick read on fixes for slow speeds: http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/#speed

The Azureus FAQ has an excellent Wiki with NAT problem solutions and healthy-torrent-talk on there.. except I think the Azureus team put up a brand-new Wiki recently, and it's dead right now. Still, here's the link: http://azureus.aelitis.com/wiki/

Azureus is my client of choice by the way. I highly recommend it. Another client that has gained popularity extremely quickly and has now established itself as a major "player" among the BT clients out there is uTorrent. Here's another great guide :)

Hope this helps.

Mark0:
Another thing to note is that some provider do traffic shaping on some ports, typically used by BitTorrent and some other P2P file sharing software (like eMule). Here in Italy at least, but I have read of some other around the world too.

Bye!

Mark0:
Carol, just to double check, you may try to download a video from my Tracker, here: http://www.exe64.com:6969/

Try the second file, Windows XP on Apple iMac - The video.
It's small (7MB), but you should get more than 100KB/sec. on that one.
And now there are only about 14 seeders. The day I put up that file as a mirror, it was downloaded about 1000 times, with over 80 seeders. Download speeds was typical waaaay above 300KB/sec.

Bye!

brotherS:
It is so frustrating as I don't seem to be able to get speeds consistently above 10K/sec

[...]

Why do people rate BT technology so highly? Is it just me having this crap experience?
-Carol Haynes (March 26, 2006, 12:13 PM)
--- End quote ---
You must be doing something (very) wrong... :(

Please read http://azureus.aelitis.com/wiki/index.php/Good_settings_for_high_download_speed

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