Conservative Settings Chart (Alternate Speed Guide for uTorrent)

[weknowhowtolive]

Thanks, yeah I realize it doesnt guarantee a speed, I just thought it was a weird a file with so many seeders and connected seeders was only giving me 200kB/s

OO downloaded at about 550 kB/s.

[Switeck]

The speed test is measuring peak/burst speeds, not sustained speeds.

ComCast has SpeedBoost which makes speed tests results a LOT higher than your sustained speeds.

You may only have 1-2 megabit/second upload speed.

[rider555]

Well $%*&.I just adjusted my settings.The download speed was already pretty slow(around 78kilabits).After this,now it went down to 1.9...the hell?!!

[Switeck]

Great, I don't know what settings you had...what you changed it to...OR the speed of your line.

But I'm supposed to tell you how to fix it?

[Heph]

So I just ran the speed test and I got: DLspeed 1405 Kb/s, ULspeed 910 Kb/s, Latency 38 ms

Being that I'm downright noobish to this kinda thing, those numbers mean nothing to me. If someone could please tell me what connection type I should be working with I would greatly appreciate it.

[Switeck]

Heph,

2nd link in my signature...no higher than 900 kilobits/second upload settings.

(You said your line was capable of 910 kilobits/second.)

1st link in my signature if you still have extremely slow speeds and/or firewalled issues.

[Heph]

Thanks.

So I went with a 768 Kb/s upload speed as it was the closest I could get to my 910 Kb/s without going over. Should I still use the 900 Kb/s recommended settings in your chart, though?

[vvixx]

Hi

I am not very computer literate, but have lately updated to the newer version of torrent. Now when i try to d/load a movie (for example) it takes me to the limewire page and i don't want this to happen, can someone please point me in the right direction?

PLEASE thanking you!!!!

[moogly]

@vvixx:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=33939

[vvixx]

Thankyou for showing me how to get rid of the nuisance limewire...i am already downloading using utorrent...i greatly appreaciate your help, have a great day!!!! CHEERS

[Switeck]

Heph said: "Should I still use the 900 Kb/s recommended settings in your chart, though?"

I like to think my chart settings are more effective under normal use.

But...part of that is uTorrent will back off on the number of upload slots it's using *IF* your upload speed per upload slot falls too low. Each needs to get about 3-10 KB/sec to maximize download speed. The faster the connection and the more peers to draw from, the faster each upload slot needs to be. Otherwise you end up trading "scraps" with chumps.

If you're uploading too slowly to a peer, it may ignore you and not return the favor. If you're uploading 3-10 KB/sec and it doesn't return the favor, uTorrent will upload less often and for possibly less time each and upload to other peers instead in the hopes they give more.

Another reason why I allow more upload slots and active torrents than the standard speed guide (CTRL+G) in uTorrent is because people WANT that. Better to give them what they want to a degree than have them use the horrible-for-everyone YouTube settings which sabotage things so badly that ISPs are forced to take hostile measures against almost everyone using BitTorrent to prevent network meltdowns caused by the abuse of the few YouTube settings users -- with their 1000+ global connections, 50-500 half open connections at once, 50+ active torrents, and stupid numbers of upload slots.

So if you want slightly more downloading torrents at once...increasing downloading torrent limits up to active torrents is ok, since it shouldn't change average upload slot speed.

[Heph]

Thanks again, Switeck. I'm having some issues, though.

So I created a static IP, port forwarded, adjusted my settings based on my upload speed (900 kB/s), and I'm still getting painfully slow dl speeds. We're talking no more than 1.5 kB/s, with an upload speed that's not much higher, although sometimes it'll hit like 30 kB/s for a few seconds or so, and head right back down. I'm a complete noob at this so forgive my ignorance, but one of my torrents which never has any less than about 250 seeds (which is a good thing right?), never seems to have more than 20 or so that are active at any given time.

I'm just wondering if I'm missing something, or is this is normal?

[Switeck]

If you're having major download+upload problems...either the seeds/peers are slow, your networking hardware and/or software is interfering (and that includes hostile ISPs!), or uTorrent is set incorrectly. And if you set uTorrent like you said...I think we can rule out the last one.

The 1st link in my signature is Ultima's large troubleshooting guide. If it can't help you, it can at least direct what info you need to give us to get further help. Please make a separate post in Speed Problems forum if you need further troubleshooting though...

[xufos66]

please help me to set up for 1024/128? i use speed guide but i still to doubt with that setting

[Switeck]

128 kilobit/sec upload settings, since that's all you got!

You can try raising your upload speed max in uTorrent after that and seeing if uTorrent CAN upload faster. That's almost as good (and sometimes better) than standard online speed tests.

I probably should redo my Speed Guide and sticky that in the Speed Forum, then LOCK that post (to prevent 8+ pages of "what speed should I use?" questions cluttering it) while leaving a link to this one as a place for discussion.

I need to rethink my guide in light of the huge numbers of very bad routers and wireless USB networking devices -- most of which cannot manage more than 40-100 connections at once.

Many people want to run as many torrents as possible, and even if it's less than ideal (even by far!) better to give settings that can work with that in mind than more restrictive settings that won't get used...lest they get discouraged and go use "YouTube speedup settings" instead.

There's also an extreme problem with seeding with low upload slots and LOTS of connected peers. Most peers get the impression that the seed doesn't upload. Sure the upload slots jump around, but it can take 15+ minutes to reach 10 peers even when set to 2-4 upload slots. With 50 peers...probably hours to reach them all.

I also need to also add 2-10 mbit/sec upload settings, since many people now have connections in that speed range.

2,5, and 10 isn't enough anymore.

Ideally, uTorrent should run ...but not necessarily run well...with only 5 connections.

It should run ok with 10 connections and run great with 30.

But currently this is only true on torrents with very good peers+seeds.

[Rigmar Radio]

Smaller numbers are good. It would be really nice if someone was to convert this to kB (Kilo Bytes per second) and have a seperate upload and download speed table so the results of say http://www.speedtest.net could mean something here.

True you can convert with ease but Mega Bits per second is just a scam ISP's use to 'look' as if they are giving you faster speeds or more bandwidth. kBs being the more easily understood and worked with rule and as they are packet of data, the more accurate guage of your actual performace in real life.

[Switeck]

http://www.speedtest.net usually gives speed results in kilobits/second (as well as possibly KiloBYTES/second). If you're on cable or ADSL 2+, and the results say 999 something upload, you can probably bet it means 999 kilobits/second upload.

The 2nd column on my chart is KiloBYTES/second as well, though you might want to use slightly under the results you got in a speed test from my chart. So if the speed tests said 45 KiloBYTES/second upload speed, you'd probably need to choose the 384 kbit/sec (35 KiloBYTES/second upload speed) or hopefully the 448 kbit/sec (40 KiloBYTES/second upload speed.)

[jewelisheaven]

Forgive me, but I just noticed this because someone bumped it, but according to http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=52014 THIS is "our" guide *now*. Maybe IT will be adopted by 1.9 stable.

Edit: Fail-fu is at 1000 today, for manual URLs.

[Switeck]

Ok, this guide has been moved from the GENERAL forum to the Speed Problems forum...and not without problems.

All direct links to it are now broken, because the move was done improperly and actually created a NEW thread rather than just moving the old one.

Ultima's Troubleshooting Guide and the warning about YouTube settings now point to the correct location.

I also did some minor changes to the guide.

From about 320 kbit/sec to 1 mbit/sec upload speeds I increased the number of downloading torrents at once to 1 less than max active torrents. This will still keep at least 1 torrent seeding but also keep downloading torrents active if you have a long queue.

From about 448 kbit/sec to 1.5 mbit/sec upload speeds, I slightly reduced the number of upload slots per torrent. If you had max torrents active with the old settings, it was making considerably more upload slots than was efficient. It's important to keep the allow more upload slots checked to pick up the slack in the rare cases where upload speed falls.

I am hoping that over the next year numerous changes in uTorrent will allow it to download+upload faster with far fewer connections than before.

Even still, touching on the cases where my guide does *NOT* work well...

1.overseeded torrents -- if a torrent has lots of seeds and very few peers, chances are any peers you connect to will not be terribly interested in downloading quickly from you. So don't be surprised if in those cases that your upload speed isn't at max. This happens a LOT on private tracker torrents!

2.nearly dead torrents -- if the torrents only have a handful of (slow?) peers and 1 seed, then it's HIGHLY dependent on how good that 1 seed is as to whether the torrent will ever complete...and if it will in a reasonable timeframe. The seed may be decent, but if the other peers are very unwilling to share to you even when you're giving them a lot back...there's not much you can do!

3.Private torrents on Private Trackers -- This is their own little world where many of the "normal" rules of BitTorrent are not nearly as effective. Often torrents are overseeded (high demand) or nearly dead (low demand) with very little in between. Firewalled peers and seeds are at a HUGE disadvantage in uploading to others. It becomes almost necessary to keep FAR more torrents active than is sensible in the HOPES someone starts one of those torrents and tries to download from you. The artificial rules enforced by private trackers (24 hour delay before 'new' users can download new releases, max limit of active torrents at once, 24 hour seeding requirements, >4x overseeding not allowed except by original posters, etc) often aren't so much to ensure everyone shares a fair amount but rather so the system doesn't destroy itself!

[moogly]

Yellow text on white background on the 1st post, *ouch* x_x

[Switeck]

Not everyone uses a white background and I didn't want to use red again as a warning label.

Highlight to read.

Does it not draw attention to itself in other profiles?

(This forum didn't USE to be white background and I don't know what the default logged in colors are anymore...)

[Ultima]

The default style is the style you see when not logged in. And the default post background color used to be light gray (Kontrast), which is pretty close to white anyway :|

Orange isn't that unreadable on a white background though O_o (Or did Switeck change it from yellow since the last post?)

[Firon]

He was using yellow, but changed it to orange.

[moogly]

Oh well, orange is more eye friendly during reading, thx.

[Switeck]

Glad you noticed the change.

Orange is close enough to a warning color.

I've shortened the overall text further, hopefully with little to no loss of meaning.