BitTorrent download speeds

[40sTheme]

Whenever I begin downloading a torrent (I make sure there are plenty of seeds/low leechers), the dowload speed hits ~250kbps, but then drops down to ~25. I have already forwarded the ports and all that, but that did not remedy the situation. Is there any way someone knows of fixing this?

 

[WildHorse]

THis is just a guess.

Maybe your ISP is one of those that chokes bandwidth for anything it identifies as a bit torrent?

So you start off fast, then as soon as your ISP recognizes your traffic as a BT it throttles back your speed.

Again, that's just a guess.

The workarounds for that that which I've read about involve finding a port number commonly used by other things and using that port for your BT, so that your traffic is sort of disguised among all the other signals.

Edit:
QUOTE
Also, it appears port 1720 (a VoIP [Voice over IP] port) is being unthrottled by some ISP's, so you may have to check that out as well. Alternatively, if all else fails, you could try port 443, 80, 21, 110 and as a last resort, 25. But it's better if you could try to find out what ports your ISP uses for NetMeeting/VoIP/Xbox Live etc. This is a legitimate question and they should be able to answer you what ports they use for these services without any problem/suspicion. It could very well be possible that you can bypass their BitTorrent restrictions using these types of ports.
END QUOTE
quote is from here

 

[Zap]

The other thing may be that initially you are just downloading, but then as you get more of the file, your BT client will start uploading (a good thing). Eventually the upload gets high enough to choke your UL bandwidth (a bad thing) and after that everything slows down.

Find out what your UL is and then cap your BT UL at around 80% of that speed.

 

[Kur]

Well this has happened to me many times, when I first start downloading a file and maybe get 1MB into a file on occasion upload will jump to 60kbps+ and then drop down, maybe just a starting burst?

 

[40sTheme]

Originally posted by: Zap
The other thing may be that initially you are just downloading, but then as you get more of the file, your BT client will start uploading (a good thing). Eventually the upload gets high enough to choke your UL bandwidth (a bad thing) and after that everything slows down.

Find out what your UL is and then cap your BT UL at around 80% of that speed.

You mean to find out what my ISPs UL rate is? Or am I really confused?

 

[mike3411]

Originally posted by: Kur
Well this has happened to me many times, when I first start downloading a file and maybe get 1MB into a file on occasion upload will jump to 60kbps+ and then drop down, maybe just a starting burst?

Yeah another possible cause is a certain chunk is seeded better than the rest of the file, so at first you are downloading from many peers but then fewer after a little while. It would be weird for this to happen on a well-seeded torrent but I guess its possible, not sure how you might check though.

 

[Alone]

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: Zap
The other thing may be that initially you are just downloading, but then as you get more of the file, your BT client will start uploading (a good thing). Eventually the upload gets high enough to choke your UL bandwidth (a bad thing) and after that everything slows down.

Find out what your UL is and then cap your BT UL at around 80% of that speed.

You mean to find out what my ISPs UL rate is? Or am I really confused?

Just go take a speed test (speakeasy, speedtest.net, etc) and find out what your upload rate is. After that, set your torrent applications upload limit to 80% of that.

 

[40sTheme]

Originally posted by: Alone

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: Zap
The other thing may be that initially you are just downloading, but then as you get more of the file, your BT client will start uploading (a good thing). Eventually the upload gets high enough to choke your UL bandwidth (a bad thing) and after that everything slows down.

Find out what your UL is and then cap your BT UL at around 80% of that speed.

You mean to find out what my ISPs UL rate is? Or am I really confused?

Just go take a speed test (speakeasy, speedtest.net, etc) and find out what your upload rate is. After that, set your torrent applications upload limit to 80% of that.

Gotcha. Thanks!

 

[fierydemise]

If you want to see if your problem is ISP throttling try this in utorrent, open up the speed guide (click the yellow triangle/ green circle) and check the "Enable Encryption" box. If that fixes your problem then thats it, otherwise you can be relatively sure the problem isn't ISP throttling.

 

[Flammable]

comcast speedboost ftl?

 

[Xecuter]

Peerguardian helps me out.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: Alone

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: Zap
The other thing may be that initially you are just downloading, but then as you get more of the file, your BT client will start uploading (a good thing). Eventually the upload gets high enough to choke your UL bandwidth (a bad thing) and after that everything slows down.

Find out what your UL is and then cap your BT UL at around 80% of that speed.

You mean to find out what my ISPs UL rate is? Or am I really confused?

Just go take a speed test (speakeasy, speedtest.net, etc) and find out what your upload rate is. After that, set your torrent applications upload limit to 80% of that.

Hmm, speedtest.net is pretty snazzy. My results are as follows:

Latency: 34ms
Server: Atlanta, GA
Distance: ~350 mi

Download: 7374 kb/s
Upload: 2386 kb/s

Apparently my internet connection is faster than 92% of the worlds' users...

Pretty useful test site to find simulated "real world" latencies and bandwidth to different servers.

 

[0roo0roo]

use port other than 6881 as said+encryption