Speedup Torrent Download Speed

Semester break is one of my favourite period becoz I can now watch movie collected or to be downloaded..harharhar. Talking about download, in this post I will share what I know and what I did to get optimal download speed especially for torrent downloading.

1. Buy a faster internet package

Rule of thumb. Get a wider bandwidth will give you higher speed. This is the simplest way but, you will need to fork out some money to get better and faster connectivity. Nothing is free in this world yo. Even you want to pee or poo also need moolah ok.

2. Portforwading
In torrenting world, this is the most common issue people talkabout. Do you know(whoa..is this some kind science teacher says or what) that, most OS and router have in-built firewall installed? Portforward is a technique used to forward data coming from certain port to internal host hence the name 'portforwarding'. Nowadays, most router have UPnP support you can utilize but for me, I always opt to manually forward a port. To learn more about portforwarding, go to this SITE.

typical port forward in Aztech DSL600EU router

3. Take alternatives
Some ISP might throttle your internet connection for their so called fair usage policy blablabla(this is true for my ISP tmNut). You can opt for 2 choices. 1, go ranting, yelling at their office or 2, buy yourself a virtual private network. Trust me..it worth it. I'm using bolehVPN.

The first time I tried it, there is significant(or..HUGE) differences. Before using vpn, my download speed is stucked at 10~30kBps so I suspect ISP is throttling my internet connection. Then, I subscribe for a VPN. Nah..picture worth thousand words. Download speed shoot to 106KBps(my limit)

4. Don't be Stingy

I've seen a lot of people cap their upload speed to almost halt. It's true that too much upload will cause your download suffer but you need to remember Peer-to-Peer like torrent works like using give-reward scheme. In laymen term, if other(B) send data to you(A) but you don't send anything back, (B) torrent client will not send anything to you next time.

I usually set my download speed 80% from total bandwitdh: 1Mbps*80%=819kbps/102KBps

For upload, I set 85% from total upstream: 384kbps*85%=40KBps

Well, this is my configuration for my internet speed. You might want to experiment with bandwidth limit thingy ;)

5. Torrent selection

If you found multiple torrent for similar file, choose torrent that have higher seeder that peer/leecher. This will increase your chance to get faster speed while download the file. Also, torrent client nowadays have this useful features where you can select what to and not to download(called selective download). Use this to select appropriate file(s) to download.

6. Increase TCP Max Half-Open Connection

To enable torrent client establish more connection to peers/seeders, you can set

net.max_halfopen found in(for uTorrent 2.0.4 client) Options --> Preferences --> Advanced.

But, before set value there,download a patch HERE to patch Windows XP halfopen maximum

value. Set anything in 50-100 range then set max_halfopen in uTorrent. Again, you may need

to experiment with the value though coz it may and may not improve your speed.