How to make download speeds faster (UTorrent)

[TonyHetherington]

Hi all

I use UTorrent to download only free-to-download things, and I can only get a maximum of 20kb download speed. No more (well, 20.1, 20.2).

I think it's through Freeserve that our broadband is done (2mb connection) as it's done through my dad's company and they sort it all.

So why won't it go over 20kb? I've done the port forwarding thing, so that's ok, and it's an exception in the firewall etc, but I'm not sure how to improve it?!

Thanks anyone!
Tony

[Plotloss]

Sounds like they are bandwidth shaping.

In uTorrent preferences there is a data encryption setting.

Turn this on.

Overall it reduces the number of potential peers but theoretically the peers you do get a connection to should provide packets in a format which is more difficult for the ISP proxy to shape.

[David Godfrey]

Plotloss said:

Sounds like they are bandwidth shaping.

In uTorrent preferences there is a data encryption setting.

Turn this on.

Overall it reduces the number of potential peers but theoretically the peers you do get a connection to should provide packets in a format which is more difficult for the ISP proxy to shape.

and check your running the latest version + some ISP's only throttle during peak times, so if you let it go overnight you may get better throughput.

Edited by David Godfrey on Monday 30th July 19:16

[TonyHetherington]

Thanks for the replies guys!

I had the encryption already on and it was still doing it unfortunately. Ah well, thanks for the advice! I'll see what it's like through the night.

Tony

[JimNotJon]

Is Utorrent the software? Try using BitLord, hell of a lot better.


http://www.bitlord.com

[Rednut05]

JimNotJon said:

Is Utorrent the software? Try using BitLord, hell of a lot better.


http://www.bitlord.com

You say that yet you don't know what utorrent is....

[Diablo SVTT]

It's to do with how well seeded the item you're downloading is. I also have a 2MB internet connection, and if I download something rare & old, the speed is low, but with a new, well-seeded torrent, it'll download at full speed.

[TonyHetherington]

Thanks everyone! I'm geting 60kb/s at the moment so it looks like they do lower the speed around peak use times (7 o'clock last night for example) so during the night I got lots downloaded. Well, that allowed me, because it then comes on to people not seeding and only downloading...grumble!

Thanks

[qube_TA]

Traffic shaping is the usual culprit for limiting BT speeds, the shaping software is clever enough to spot it even if it's encrypted.

If you want better downloads use IRC or newsgroups as they're not often filtered.

[TonyHetherington]

If I can get 60k at one point (and 100k at stupid o'clock yesterday morning), I don't mind too much - I was just worried that I'd be downloading huge files at max 20kb/s and it would take weeks!

Must admit I like the way utorrent works so will stick with that for a bit!

Thanks again
Tony

[TheKeyboardDemon]

Port shaping is just 1 of the things your ISP might do to restrict access another is Port throttling where 'excessive' activity on a particular (non-webrowsing) port might be restricted so that more bandwidth will be available for normal web-browsing and e-mail etc.. Get round this by regularly changing the ports you use.

[FunkyGibbon]

I was having download problems with utorrent so tried Azureus http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

was getting >300kB/s last night