Newbie with speed problems

[stephenhicks1974]

I'm only just getting to grips with some of the terminology surrounding bittorrents so i'm looking for a better understanding of what is happening and if there is a problem, what to do about it.

I'm trying to download certain files from within a larger single bittorrent. I've done this several times and sometimes I get connections speeds of around 30 to 50 kbs. Sometimes it goes higher but only for a few minutes at a time

However, on a couple of occasions I get nothing more than 2 kbs and given the size of some of these files it takes days to download. Upspeeds vary greatley from zero to 40kbs

It appears that I have no seeds and only a few peers. Is this because other people just dont have the files? is it because im not trying to download all the files? or is there a potential problem, and if so, what is it likely to be?

I also noted that when I started the download I had a very high speed (for me) of over 140 kbs. This lasted a few hours then dropped to 2kbs where it has pretty much stayed for the last three days.

In the log it says Error opening windows Firewall. - I do not have any firewalls switched on. ( None installed and the default windows one is disabled )

I've tried various settings to improve the connection but the only thing that seems to make a difference is unchecking Enable Upnp port mapping drops the speed to zero.

Any advice / suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

[jewelisheaven]

Choosing to selectively download files, especially on smaller swarms, can definitely explain slower, and spurty download speeds. Ideally when you have peers in the swarm they take whatever the piece is that others don't have from the 1 or several seeds so that it can continue to keep the swarm alive by only putting itself out there once... but that is definitely compounded with people who are not wanting the whole dataset to download from. I'm not sure about the sustained slow speeds except to say.. many long-term seeders set torrents at a low rate in order TO KEEP seeding for so long. They rely on others spreading the data for them, and are only on the swarm to keep it alive.

With your description of the firewall setting, you can safely ignore the error message. There doesn't seem to be a configuration problem with your line.. as long as you can accept incoming connections. UPnP shouldn't affect your speeds, either positively or negatively. If you'd like to know more about bittorrent check out the http://btfaq.com/#what and as far as uT, there's always the Manual http://download.utorrent.com/utorrent-help.zip