Someone explain bittorrent to me?

[Rye]

Why is it that sites say there's like 50 seeds, and I can usually only connect to like 2, and doesn't actually download, just say "connecting to peers"? Is there any way to speed it up? What's the best client? I use bittornado at the moment.

[Melchior]

Why is it that sites say there's like 50 seeds, and I can usually only connect to like 2, and doesn't actually download, just say "connecting to peers"? Is there any way to speed it up? What's the best client? I use bittornado at the moment.

Have you got a firewall?

[Rye]

Yeah, the Sygate personal firewall pro, it lets it through, but i only seem to be able to connect to a precious few, and my upload is usually twice my download.

[YT300000]

Setting the min port to 2000 and the max to 2002 greatly increased DL speeds for me, but that's with TorrentStorm.

[Sir Sirius]

What client are you using?

[DocHorror]

Yeah, I get that too.

[Rye]

What client are you using?

Bit tornado. Here's a screenshot of an example of how it usually is:

[Duckie]

You still could be behind a firewall- I had to play with mine a bunch even after I thought I got it, including which port. I opened Ports 50000-50004 for ABC and it runs fine- gets 20-50 kB/s speed which is adequate for anything but a huge download.

Try limiting your upload speed when downloading. There should be an option for that somewhere.

[Datana]

Some ISPs have instituted speed throttling on the default Bittorrent ports (6881-6889). You should redesignate the ports Bittornado uses to something in the 50000-60000 range (I use 58641-58649), and then set your firewall to forward incoming connections on those ports. I can get around 100 kB/s on a good day and around 50 kB/s normally after doing this, when I was limited to about 10 kB/s before (I'm capped at 24 kB/s upload and have to reserve 3-4 kB/s of that for web browsing, for comparison).