Torrentfreak.com: How to Speed up µTorrent - (Is this accurate/true)

[hush]

*I don't know how accurate this Tutorial is, but it looked interesting so I thought I would post it on here and see what others had to say about it.*

*Feel free to post your comments to support or debunk this tutorial.*

*Thanks guys!*

- hush

Tutorial written by Ernesto of Torrentfreak.com.

How to Speed Up µTorrent

In a previous post we advised to raise the maximum amount of half-open tcp connections to speed up your torrents. On itself this is a great trick, however I recently discovered that 90% off all people use the default settings on their client, and that's a problem.

Both Bitcomet and µTorrent (and probably other clients) limit half-open tcp connections by default. This means even if you hack the max half-open tcp connections in windows xp, your speed will still be limited.

So this is what you need to do:

First of all, read this post that gives you some tips and tricks how to speed up your torrents

1. Hack the max half-open TCP connections

If you're on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This seriously hurts your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to a high amount of ip numbers. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it also cripples your torrent downloads.

A nice way to fix this is to download this patch, it allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok (more is NOT always better).

2. Configure your torrent client to allow 50-100 max half-open TCP connections

µTorrent: Options > Preferences > Advanced options > net.max_halfopen

tcputorrent

Now you're ready to go…

A third point of interest is that some "windows updates" revert your tweaked tcp connections back to 10. So it's wise to check this every now and then. You can check this by going to (in windows xp) Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > System… Look for event 4226 (sort by event).

event

If there are a lot of daily occurences it's likely that the max amount of half-open tcp connections was set back to 10. Or you're infected with some nasty spyware…

If you're done, you might want to try the torrent settings optimizer to check if all setting are correct

Link to the Torrentfreak.com article: http://torrentfreak.com/speed-up-bitcomet-and-%c2%b5torrent/

*I don't know how accurate this Tutorial is, but it looked interesting so I thought I would post it on here and see what others had to say about it.*

*Feel free to post your comments to support or debunk this tutorial.*

*Thanks guys!*

- hush

[WebReaper]

All of this has been repeatedly posted before, so I suspect it's true.

Having said that, I've never patched my system or altered my half-open limits, but download and upload at my max connection rates 24/7, so I never quite understand what the point or need is to do that.

[Ishi]

changing half-open value in utorrent will only give trouble for average user, however patching win limit is good.

and it does not really increase speed.

[Russ]

it might say [Error] File not found ...

so heres the link for that patch that changes the halfopen connections to 50

http://lvllord.de/?lang=en&url=downloads

thanks for the rest of the info

[Ultima]

Generally, it doesn't help speed anything up besides the ramp up speed. Besides that, you should not set the net.max_halfopen to the same thing as the TCPIP.sys limit, which the guide seems to imply (or at least it doesn't give any clear amount, which would lead many users to select the same number). 70%-80% of the TCPIP.sys limit is a good range for which to set the net.max_halfopen limit to.

[Harry Poppins]

"Half open" describes a connection that is initiated but not fully established, so like Ultima said, the number of half open connections only affects how fast you connect to a number of peers, not to how many peers you can connect or how fast your download will be (which is what that tutorial would have you believe).

[Nefarious]

it may speed up things starting the torrent, like having connected to 50 people instead of 10 or something, it will not speed up the average time the torrent takes time to finish by much, if at all

[Switeck]

Worse, on large torrents with many seeds+peers, because the half-open value is high, µTorrent will almost always be trying LOTS of new ips at once...thus slowing down the ones you're already connected to!

I don't see lots of gains connecting to more than 40 peers+seeds per torrent...but I can only upload at 40 KB/sec.