Anyone familiar with BitTorrent can help ?

[Vorph]

All you need is what Andorion and I posted. Well, that and a basic understanding of BitTornado.

[Iannis]

This is why Bit Torrent needs to remain only a program used for illegal filesharing. It really does suck ass. I refuse to use anything but tornado nowadays

That or have the crack Blizzard coder team redesign it or some shit to make it not jew the fuck out of the d/l speed of people with decent upload.

[Etruscus]

I just went through recently. This is how I get most of my music at indietorrents.com and a couple others

The reason why people are getting such shitty download speeds is your ISP throttles the default ports for bittorent which are 6881 - 6889 (to 6999 with version 3.2). Most people don't bother to change the defaults, your ISP knows this, so they throttle the shit out of them. You can change the ports that you torrent clients uses. It is recomended if you do this to not use the default bittorent client but to use another one like ABC (the one I use) tornado, Azureus, or any other one that has some kind of a GUI. A range between is recomended 49152 through 65535. It's normally not a good idea to tell people freely what port you are using, because if a lot of people start using the same ports the ISPs will catch on and throttle those ports.

Also, a lot of people are behind a NAT and they don't realise it. I was, for example. I had to call up my ISP and they emailed me some firm wear for my DSL modem so I could do port forwarding myelf.

Torrents like to be able to upload, at the same time that they are downloading. They can download faster, but only to a point so you do not want to saturate your up speed. So, for example if you are usiing ABC torrent client you will need to go to and then set the settings how you want them. Don't leave them at 0, because this is unlimited. You will also probably need to swtich to at the bottom because some trackers do not allow you to download if you can not seed for a period greater then 24 hours.

A good source is the one The Bog already linked. Also, this FAQ at indietorrents is pretty good.

http://www.indietorrents.com/faq.php#user8

and then there is the Brian's bittorent FAQ which can get a little technical

http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/1.html

This little blurb from Brian's probably covers yours (and a few others who posted) problems

BitTorrent will usually work fine in a NAT (network address translation) environment, since it can function with only outbound connections. Such environments generally include all situations where multiple computers share one publicly-visible IP address, most commonly: computers on a home network sharing a cable or xDSL connection.

However, you will get better speeds if you allow incoming connections as well. To do this you must use the "port forwarding" feature of whatever is performing the NAT/gateway task. For example, if you have a cable or DSL connection and a router/switch/gateway/firewall, you will need to go into the configuration of this device and forward ports 6881-6889 to the local machine that will be using BitTorrent. If your device makes it hard to enter a range of ports (if you must enter each one separately), then you can just do the first 10 or so ports, or however many simultaneous clients you plan to ever have open. If more than one person behind such a gateway wishes to use BitTorrent, then each machine should use a different port range, and the gateway should be configured to forward each port range to the corresponding local machine.

If you have one of these broadband router/NAT devices (such as the Linksys BEFSR41, D-Link DI-701/704, Netgear RT311, SMC Barricade, 3Com Home Ethernet Gateway, etc.) you will usually need to enter the web configuration of the device. If you're not sure, try http://192.168.1.1 or sometimes http://192.168.0.1. If you can't figure it out, try the manual for the device -- they are often on the manufacturer's web site in PDF form. You can also try the forums at places like Broadband Reports or Practically Networked. To see an example of what you're looking for, this is a link to the Linksys BEFSR41 manual. Look at page 55, under the section "Port Range Forwarding."