Utorrent help need to increace DL speed.?

Question

I have utorrent 1.7.7 ive been downloading for a while now but my download speed has always been really slow. Im pretty much clueless when it comes to utorrent all i know is how to download the file thats it. I dont have a clue about how to increase speed etc. What are trackers and how do you add them and will they increase your speed etc. Once i was downloading and 8GB file and it was only 38.4 % done after downloading for 1week and 17 hours.

So how do i increase my download speed and on average how long does it take for a 8gb file to download ?

Answer 1

A tracker is some server that's running Bittorrent tracker software. The tracker tells your client the IP addresses of the peers that you can download/upload to/from. Therefore, it is good to have many trackers on a particular torrent, since it means that you will have the greatest chance of seeing as many of the peers in the swarm as possible.



There is also peer exchange. This is when your client gets peers from another client without contacting the tracker. Then there's DHT, distributed tracking. Through these two avenues, your client can still get peers even if all of the trackers on a particular torrent are down.



Therefore, it is a good idea to add more trackers to a torrent if you have reason to expect that some other peers are using that tracker. If you don't expect that there will be peers on that tracker for a particular torrent, however, then there's not much use in adding it.



On the other hand, if you're the person who is creating the torrent in the first place, and you're not uploading it to some private tracker, then it's a good idea to use as many trackers as you can possibly think of. I've used some torrents that have 75+ trackers (admittedly, more than half are usually dead...but still, you get the point).



As for increasing speed, make sure you're connectible. Make sure that you have correctly forwarding some port and opened it in your router. Sometimes, people think they've done this properly, when in fact, they have not. If you don't know how to do this, rather than explain it to you, it would be easier if you simply found your router at the following site and followed the guide: http://portforward.com



Again, as for speed, if you're on some kind of asymmetric connection, such as ADSL or most types of CATV (ADSL in particular though) then you can limit your upload speed to ~80% of your maximum line capacity. This will allow you to saturate your downstream. Just remember to set your upstream back to `unlimited` when you begin to seed.



Beyond that, there's not much more that you can do other than ask for a reseed.



And also, 1 week and 17 hours is not an altogether unreasonable amount of time for it to take to download 8GB. `Slow` is a completely relative term and it depends entirely on what you're used to. To me, for instance, that's not too bad.

Answer 2

There's quite a bit to get into here but I'll stick to the basics.



Your download speed is dependant on many factors. The number of seeds and peers and the ratio of one to the other is a major factor. The more connected seeds you have the better but if there are lots more peers then the amount of bandwidth each peer can offer you is small usually. Again this is all dependant on the uploaded bandwidth your peers have.



If you look at the bottom of the uTorrent windows and a little warning triangle appears instead of a green tick then you haven't forwarded a port. If you double click on the icon it will show you the port number that uTorrent is using to connect. Go to http://www.portforward.com , choose you router model and it will give you a guide to forwarding a port. This will increase your speed also.

Answer 3

Ive not messed much with trackers but here is somethings I do that boosts my speed.



Download the latest version of uTorrent, for some reason now, the latest version automatically pickups up port forwarding for me.



Go to options > speed guide



Change your connection type to the closest one. For instance, I have AT&T 6m connection so I selected xx/10Mbit.



Then click on 'test if port is forwarded correctly'. If its green and says OK then port forwarding is set up properly.



Another thing I do is go to:



options > preferences



Left click 'advanced' once and then scroll down on the left hand side till you see the netmax_half open entry. Change it to 50 and click set.



Restart uTorrent and see what happens.