6 Tips to Optimize Torrent Downloads
Posted on 19. Aug, 2009 by UzEE in How To, Internet Tools
If you are like the most of us, you rely on torrents to supply you with the latest and greatest stuff out there (legal, of course…). Unfortunately, downloading from the BitTorrent network can be extremely slow if you don’t know how it works.
Here is a list of 6 ways to optimize your torrent downloads.
Bypass Firewall
One of the easiest and most straight forward ways to boost your torrent download speeds is to add it to your firewall’s exception list. Since the BitTorrent network relies on sharing, it can significantly handicap your download potential if you aren’t sharing properly.
Port Forward
The next logical step after bypassing the firewall is to open up your BitTorrent port as well. Bind your client to a static port and then forward that port from your router or modem. Here is our guide on how to do it.
Half Open Connection
Windows limits the maximum number of TCP/IP connections you can have at a time to around 10. This is to put a cap on malicious programs like malware which try to download from the internet. On the down side, this cap significantly limits your download bandwidth in case of torrents. There are many ways to safely increase the number of half open connections in Windows.
Share Ratio
This is one factor that is somewhat out of your control – the Seeder to Peer ratio or the share ratio of a torrent. There is a general misconception that torrents with thousands of seeders and peers would perform better than those which only have these numbers in 10s. This isn’t true. In fact, the more important factor is seeder/peer ratio of a torrent. So a torrent with something like 23,875 seeds and 47,234 peers would perform a lot worse than one with 14 seeds and 4 peers.
Upload Speed
This is one of the most tricky things to figure out. You have to optimize your upload limit to get the most out of your downstream. I’ve written a guide on how to do this on my blog, but for a quick idea, you have to set your upload limit to something just under your actual upload data rate.
Multiple Trackers
Having multiple trackers for a torrent generally improves its performance. Having alternate trackers means you can connect to more peers and seeders, thus allowing more stable connections. Open trackers work best in this case, so just add the following to the list of trackers in your torrents:
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
Here you have it, my quick cheat sheet for optimizing BitTorrent to get the most juice out of your connection. Be warned though, this may greatly increase your internet bandwidth utilization, so if you don’t have an unlimited data plan, then make sure you keep things in check. Another golden rule is the more you seed, the more you reap.
(By) Uzair Sajid (UzEE), is a technologist and a freelance blogger who also authors The Technopath.
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