Need help with various issues.

[DragonLord89]

Ok, I'm practically brand new to the whole torrent thing. Been only using it for a day so far. So if I come off as sounding noobish please don't kill me. Ok here's my problem- I'm trying to transfer a file which is 7 GB. I left my computer on over night and expected the transfer to be pretty much almost done when I woke up in the morning. Imagine my surprise when I rushed to the computer and saw that it had only downloaded 3% of the freaking file throughout the night. For some reason, the file is transfering painfully slow; an average of 5.0 kbps, sometimes it goes up to 10 kbps and sometimes it even goes as low as 0.1 kbps.

The file itself is supposed to have 344 seeds and 721 peers, so i know that that's not the problem.

I've heard that if you "port forward" your router the speed will increase a lot. Problem is I have no idea how to do this. I've researched it and so far haven't found any guide that can help me. Even the one at http://portforward.com/ couldn't help because when I go to the Ip address of my router like it says in their guide, my page looks completely different than the way that they are showing, so I can't follow along with the steps.

My router is a Verizon actiontec gt704wg.

I've ran a speed test on my connection and the download speed should be 742 kbps.

So can anybody help me out here. Am I doing something wrong? I really want to download the file, but I kind of don't want to wait a whole month for the file to finish transfering...

[jewelisheaven]

I see you said "supposed to have XX seeds YY peers". How many were you actually connecting to. That's a possible source of your problem. Be sure your connection works on those settings by testing with a known working torrent to save yourself headache later. You can use either http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ (Open Office EXE, ~100 MiB) or http://slackware.com/torrents/ (Slackware Linux CD/DVD images ~ 700 MiB -> 3000 MiB)

You don't need to leave them running until it's finished or even > 5 minutes as long as you see a consistent speed (you can verify with the Speed tab) down. Upload won't be much as you're going to be pulling pretty fast.

[DragonLord89]

"I see you said "supposed to have XX seeds YY peers". How many were you actually connecting to."

- I already stopped downloading the file, so I don't remember too good. But I think I was getting around 30 something seeds and the peers was a little bit higher than that.

"Be sure your connection works on those settings by testing with a known working torrent to save yourself headache later."

- I tried downloading from the second link you posted and it was downloading much faster than before but it was still kind of slow. It was downloading at around 88 kbps to 95 kbps.

So, I'm guessing that the first file I was trying to download was no good? Or is it that I need to change some settings or something? Thanks for the help by the way...

[jewelisheaven]

An estimated 768 Kbps down means you can expect only 96 KiBps total... if that's what you're paying for then OK. What was your rated UPLOAD speed? Choose the numbers from the Speed Guide (Ctrl-G) to be sure you're not saturating your upload keeping you from downloading more. As you download more you upload a tiny bit to compensate for the acknowledgement of the data you are getting. Therefore if you are ALREADY uploading at or past your maximum it will impede continual downloading.

After that, double check with your upload. Is it sticking to the limit you set lower?

If so, and if you don't notice any increase on this specific torrent I say stick with it. Try another, though those 7 gigs will take a bit on < 90 KiBps even on a good day.