Start and Stop

[AgenT]

I've been downloading this file for a while now, and it's always at 0 kb/s except for periods lasting for approximately 5 minutes where the speed shoots up to 40-50 kb/s... I don't know what to do to fix this starting and stopping

[Switeck]

The torrents you're trying to download may be fakes or have only 1 very slow seed. A very slow seed will burp out 1 full piece over maybe 15-60 minute. 2 MB piece size at 1 KiloBYTE/sec upload rate takes over 30 minutes! (Not unlikely especially if the seed has multiple torrents going and has multiple upload slots PER torrent.) Since you may not in fact be connected with the 1 seed, you're downloading from other peer/s that did connect to that 1 seed. They probably have limited upload speeds, so even if you have infinite download+upload bandwidth, you still could only get a piece from them at maybe 40 KiloBYTES/sec if they were fast. But they upload the single piece quickly (2 MB at 40 KiloBYTES/sec is only ~52 seconds)...and your download speed dies right back down to 0.

Rinse, repeat...and hope it's important and lucky enough to complete.

Setting µTorrent up to be a friendly uploader will make the other peers likely to share to you first rather than last, but if the seed leaves...everyone is screwed.