[56k] How to limit the number of seeds and peers ?

[Mr. Mojo]

Hi,

I use μTorrent with a 56 k connection (yeah, I know, poor of me).

I've noticed something :

- when I download a file with a lot of seeders and leechers (more than 1000), I get an average download speed of 1,6 kB/s.

- when I download a file with few seeders and leechers (~ 100), I get an average download speed of 2,1 kB/s.

I know that difference seems to be nothing for your high speed connection, but it means 1 or 2 days of wait for me. I guess the difference comes from the overhead generated by the exchanges with the others clients. Am I right on this ?

So, I was wondering if there was a way to limit the number of seeders and leechers I'm connected to, in order to reduce this overhead and gain download speed.

I hope I've been clear enough in my thought, as you've noticed English is not my natural language.

PS : Just to give you an idea, depending the average download speed (1,6 or 2,1 kB/s), I download a 700 MB file in 4 or 6 days.

[DreadWingKnight]

Preferences - bittorrent

Set your connection limits down to 20 global, 20 per torrent.

[Switeck]

Turn off DHT, lower half open connections to only 1-4 (1 if unfirewalled, 4 if firewalled), disable UPnP, and disable Resolve IPs in Peers window.

Get a connection tweaker program (I recommend TCP Optimizer) to set your 56k connection to the highest MTU it supports. You'll probably need to do some testing to find it.

After all that, I'd expect you to hit at least 3 KiloBYTES/sec download speed...assuming you are actually getting at least 40,000 baud connection speed and low error rate.

[Mr. Mojo]

Thanks for your tips.

I've applied them and now got a 2,2-2,3 KB/sec. average download speed. That's better.

[Switeck]

Lower the number of connections you allow as low as 5 and no more than 20.

It may vary from torrent to torrent as to which is best.

[hermanm]

Any thoughts on whether enabling or disabling hardware compression on the modem makes a difference on transfer speeds as far as torrent pieces are concerned?

[Thehound]

It could help to enable it but rarely is that significant. Also, your ISP does need to support it. It can help alot if there is much null data in normal transfer, but torrents are piece based. However, having it on will not hurt anything, provided you are not getting many errors(trust me, you'd know it if that was causing errors, as it would show significantly and make your net crawl). So I say leave it on, unless you have a noisy line with an already high error rate, which compression would make even worse.