Problem with limited up/download

[Nosada]

Hello everyone,

I live in good old 'tarded Belgium, where most things are still a few lightyears behind the rest of the world. My ISP, which was the best deal I could get in the entire country, costs me roughly 70$ for a 4Mbit line, with a 192Kbit upload cap. This isn't all that bad, until you realise I have a maximum monthly usage of 10Gigs down, 2Gigs up. 2Gigs up/month means I can only give about 66Megs/day to the community without having to pay extra on top of my already outrageous fee.

My problem lies in the latest update of µtorrent. Before, I was able to have a download/upload ratio of 200/50, which suited me fine. It left me some daily bandwidth to play with, even though I'd never even get close to my max download that way. Since the latest update however, my download has dropped significantly and my upload did the exact opposite. Now I get only a max of 150/70, and some nights, I don't even break even.

If I had uncapped internet access, as I have no doubt most people here do, I couldn't care less about my upload. The strict regulations of my ISP however, make that impossible. One bit too many means they downgrade you to 3kb/s total, which is not even enough to play an MMO, and even websites are very slow to load then. The only solution for it is purchasing additional bandwidth, which comes in at a whopping 1.5$/100Meg.

My question is this: Is there any way to increase my download/upload ratio? I am not asking to leech here, I just wanna know if there is a way to minimize my upload, if that reduces my download as well, so be it, but I am not very keen on paying extra every month.

Thank you in advance,

Nos

[Switeck]

Use Speed Guide (CTRL+G) and set the upload speed to considerably below your rated linespeed. I suggest using the xx/96kbit one. Lowering upload speed below 6 KB/sec locks max download speed (via "download limited") to 6 times your upload speed. So at 5 KB/sec up, the best you can get is 30 KB/sec down. At 1 KB/sec up, down is limited to 6 KB/sec. This is to limit the amount of damage people can cause by pretty much leeching a torrent.

Also, if you're only downloading torrents that have at least 10 peers or seeds, you can disable DHT and save more bandwidth. Use Peer Exchange instead.

If your ISP doesn't throttle BitTorrent traffic, you might even want to disable protocol encryption -- as that also adds a little overhead. Best setting for it would be to allow incomming connections to use protocol encryption if they demand it but not use it by default.

Setting half-open connections down to 6 and bt.connect speed to 10 will also reduce bandwidth consumption a tiny amount with almost nil effect on your download/upload speeds. Your ramp-up on new/restarted torrents will be a little slower, but maybe only taking 6 mins to get up to speed instead of 5 mins.