Several questions about torrent in general and µtorrent

[Jon]

I'm new the torrent protocall only been using it about a week, I've tried a few differant clients rufus bittornado bitcoment, and µtorrent. I like µtorrent the best so far, i've read the faq multiple times and a couple dozzen post. I really don't understand the speeds... I've tried about 30-40 differant settings in the last week and nothing seems to give me a steady download speed, I did manage to find excellent settings for my upload and constantly maintain a steady speed. on the technical ...

Ok i'm running a 2600 athlonxp 1GB ram, windows xp sp2 tcpip patched to 50 1.5Mb/512Kb dsl going through a router using port forwarding and get network ok (did not until i forwarded the port) ( i've even tried running through dmz) My up speed is 50KB and is very steady, my down speed has slow and drastic changes ranging from 20KB to 160KB (total down speed (also the cap i have set in µtorrent)). I've trying running 1-3 torrent at a time with and without dht, pnp, varying peer values from info from post here. The values on the torrent options ranged from:

gmnc:100-300 , mncppt: 20-200 , nuspt: 1-10 , mnat: 2-10 , mnad: 2-4

I've tried at least 40 combinations and nothing provides a steady down rate, a reasonable majority of the time i'm getting an approximate 1-1 ratio.

Now the questions.

The way it appears torrent protocall is designed is to share the load and reduce bandwidth on the primary, now from this i would think that someone just starting a torrent would get faster speeds then someone thats half done, the reason I say this is because they ca recieve chunks from anyone because they have nothing, where as someone half done can only recieve chunk from people that have pieces they don't have, however this does not at all seem to be the case and i also realise there is an endgame mode which gets a higher priority anyway ( which is why I said 50% and not 95%. So can someone clear this up on how it decides which peers/seeds to select ?

Next question I really don't understand the download speeds ... I've watched it connect to 1 peer/seed and get 70KB from them and be connected to to 5 others and get a range from .1 -7KB. is this simply the other peer/seeds have poor connections or horrible setting on there client ? [Edit: after re-reading i realised i left out part of the question: and why does it only open 5 connections in torrent x, but opens 12 connections in torrent y ?]

My up speed varies by less then 5KB over hours, but my down speed varies by as much as 40KB over 10 seconds. Why is there such a drastic variation in down speed, but up speed is quite stable ?

Noting my connection speed 1.5/.512 ( and I lock my up to 50KB and down to 160KB, i want a little free for other things) what settings would you reccommend ?

Thanks and hope you have a good christmas, and that Merry Christmas popup from µtorrent was nice, but freaked me out.

[Jon]

I know it's the holiday season, but thought a few of you would have replied by now. I need some of you long timers to fill me in and give me some suggestions.

[Switeck]

Your upload speed may be constant, but your upload SLOTS varies a bit -- and varies who they're to.

What upload slot limit did you use?

Did you limit upload slots so each upload has at least 3-5 KB/sec on average?

(upload slots total = total # of torrents TIMES ( upload slot limit + 1 for optimistic unchoke) )

If your upload slots total is 20 for instance, you'd need at least 60 KB/sec upload bandwidth to give each upload 3 KB/sec.

If you're not uploading at least 3-5 KB/sec per upload, the BitTorrent protocol makes it alot less likely that they're uploading very fast to you in return.

[Jon]

Generally I've tried to keep the upload slots to 4 per torrent ( though I have tried 3,5 6,7, and 10. Upload bandwidth set to 50KB ( global up) and running 1-3 torrent at a time. The upload speed gets to 50KB and stays very close to that, the download speed varies by as much 20KB from one .5sec tick to the next( upto 40KB using a 5 second tick.

Something I just tried that goes against what most post seem to agree on, is plugging in rediculously high numbers 2000mngc 1000mncp and for a short time maybe 10 minutes the speed increase from 60 to 100 (still had the large swings though) and after about 10-15 minutes it slowed down again.

I've spent most the evening increaseing the mncp in 3-5 increments. I started at 20 and went to 53 before giving up for the night, I've let each setting run for 10 minutes or so watching for changes, didn't notice any real change. I've tried 2 differant firmware in my router and on a few differant ports (that I forwared).

I was watching the ports µtorrent uses early and saw quite a few ports that seemed to be out of the specified range (6881 6889) it was using ports in the 1400-4400 range and one odd tcp/udp listen to ip 0.0.0.0 I know port forwarding would have no effect on that as I've setup the router using dmz and gotten the same results, but thought it worth mention.

[Firon]

For one, µTorrent doesn't use 6881-6889, it uses a single port, and it defaults to 32459.

And this only applies to INCOMING connections, outgoing uses a random port for every connection, specified by the system.

What router do you have?

Try running a speed test to see what your actual upload rate is.

[Jon]

Actiontec gt704-wg

I've run a couple dozen speed test from differant providers and it's usually 1384+ down 468+ up, the highst numbers i've seen are1509 down 509 up.

[Jon]

Well after a few more hours of testing it seems to be the torrents rather then any settings. I installed Azureus ( which I really don't like) and did speed comparisons between the two and compared the random torrents I'd been using and compared some that were almost 100% seeds ( 60 seeds 3 peers etc...) and the speeds in both cases were almost exactly the same in all test. Azureus did seam to be a good bit quicker in getting the downloads started, but wasn't any faster as all. I don't like java and I don't like the Azureus interface, so I'll be sticking with µtorrent.

[Firon]

If you want it to connect a little bit faster, (patch tcpip.sys if you're on XP SP2!), raise net.max_halfopen to a reasonable amount (40) and bt.connect_speed to a reasonable amount (60).

Just make sure you don't kill your router/modem in the process.

[Jon]

Yea I patched that days ago when i started, thought i mentioned that. it's patched to 50, and set to 40 in µtorrent.

[seamus7]

you said: " my down speed has slow and drastic changes ranging from 20KB to 160KB "

My question is: What's the problem?

Uploading is by nature steady. Downloading will fluxuate depending on the quality of the swarm and the time of day. That's just the way torrents work. Given your connection speed, downloading 20kB/s - 160 kB/s is a normal, respectable, realistic range.

Here's a great guide.