The Shackles of Torrenting

nekokate · Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Location: West Yorkshire, UK

Whenever I'm downloading something via a torrent, everything else on my computer slows down massively, to the point that it's almost impossible to watch YouTube videos and even regular webpages take like 20 seconds to load instead of the usual almost instant load.

I know that, logically, if I'm downloading a huge file, then there is far less scope for my ISP to download other things, and that's why browsing slows down, but are there any tips people know that can make it a little more bearable?

I have an ISP advertised at 2mbps, and use uTorrent, if that makes any difference, and I don't see anywhere in the options that allows me to tell it to only download slowly in order to free up transfer for other things...

Confused

faceless · admin Joined: 25 Apr 2006

if you double-click the torrent you will get an option box where you can slow it down, but it's not usually the download speed that's the problem, but the *up*. For best results limit the total overall rate (press ctrl-P then choose the connection option to sort this) to about 5-10k/s lower than what you have available. The reason being that the connection needs to send info back and forth to tell the other end that you've received info etc.

I'm always getting slow speeds with Youtube these days though, but I got this thing called SpeedBit Accelerator which seems to work quite well www.speedbit.com/video_accelerator/

nekokate · Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Location: West Yorkshire, UK

Thanks face, I'll give that a go.

I'm downloading SiCKO and trying to watch the Imran Khan episode of The Real Deal at the same time - it's just not having it!

major.tom · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 5:23 pm Post subject:

Faceless hit the nail on the head. I use a rule of only allowing an upload rate of roughly 75% of my available upload rate. This allows any outgoing traffic (web requests, etc) to have some bandwidth available. Otherwise, it gets trodden on by the (outgoing) bittorrent traffic.

Ash · Joined: 22 May 2007 Location: Al-Ard

Not directly related to this thread (, in case you don't know,) please make sure you use an IP filter like PeerGuardian to stay away from those grubby psychos. If you're using Azureus, then get SafePeer (plugin) from sourceforge webste. It's the internal IP filter, equivalent of PeerGuardian.

Oh make sure they are regularly updated. It should be done automatically. But Sometimes PG doesn't. Just do it manually and keep an eye on it

Smile