Need help increasing my peer connections

[rmjohnson260144]

I'm trying to figure out how to increase my speeds. First I have read most of the threads on people's sigs with a little improvement.

Now, I notice when I click on my peer tab that only 20 or so peers are actually connecting with me even thought uTorrent says there are like 100!

Is this a set number as all my torrents seem to be at this number withing a varying degree? I couldn't find a setting for this anywhere in options, not that I know what 90% of the options are even used for.

also, I notice there are a lot of 0.1kB peers. If I have a limit of peers I can connect to, can I filter out lower numbers in hopes it finds fasters peers instead of hitting a peer limit and getting stuck with what I have.

I do use Comcast(8mb with 12mb burst), but I usually do fairly well and don't think I am hit with a limit. I can hit 300kB/s downloads on a good day and average about 175kB/s overall.

I did find yesterday when I had to reinstall windows that I had upload speeds set to 2000 kilobit by mistake as I only have 1mb upload. But when I started uploading it was hitting 175kB/s upload speeds with an average of about 135kB/s. My other machines were at a standstill on browsing to set it back to 1mb and I can now surf without timeouts.

Thanks for any advice

-=Mark=-

[Switeck]

Just like your max download speed, your max upload speed is burstable as well...which is why you saw upload speeds for awhile that were faster than 135 KiloBYTES/second.

LOTS of peers/seeds are firewalled. That's partially why uTorrent will report far greater numbers of peers/seeds than you ever connect with. Another reason is OLD, now-disconnected peers/seeds are retained by the tracker and given out that are long-gone. Also, some peers/seeds may be changing ips every few hours and thus get reported multiple times. (Older DSL lines were prone to this!) Lastly, at least a few peers/seeds may have already reached max global or per-torrent connections and are neither making nor allowing additional connections. Very old not-firewalled seeds would seem prone to this, as they've have plenty time to see every peer that comes along.

I've got ComCast as well, but only the cheaper 6mbit line. ComCast is DEFINITELY killing BitTorrent connections where I am, (Alabama) so getting and maintaining more than 10 connections if I'm trying to seed is near-impossible. I have found that forced encryption outgoing and not allowing legacy incoming seems the best...and often 1-5 peers don't disconnect so I can still sustain high upload speeds usually.

While I'm only downloading with no seeding torrents, ComCast seems to relax their connection-kill policy but I still see a high disconnect rate even then. More than 3 out of 10 connections disconnect in the first minute alone, and that's out of the peers/seeds that actually connect for more than 1 second in the first place.