Easy way to increase DL speeds?

[javeryh]

Ive been doing a little digging and I found something called port-forwarding but it makes my head spin.  Is there an easy way to increase DL speeds when using something like uTorrent or whatever?

[protokatie]

Make sure your router isnt blocking the ports that utorrent uses for DHT, as this can cause some major speed hits. Other than that, as torrents are peer to peer, there is little you can do on your end to speed up torrent DL's (IE if the other peers and the seeders in the group have their UL speed limited, it will cap your DL speed.)
Maybe someone else has some "magic" way to increase torrent speeds, but unless you follow by seeding, I would consider it cheating the concept of torrents.

BTW, Happy belated Birthday Jav.

[Haterot]

Port forwarding won't increase your speed. Port-forwarding is when you forward port data to a specific computer/node. i.e. If you had multiple computers in your house and one of them runs ftp to host your files. You would set your router up to tell it when a request comes in for port 80 please forward this port request to computer X. That's basically Port forwarding in a nut shell.

uTorrent is at the mercy of your Dl bandwidth, the number of seeds/leechers and I believe your ISP.  My torrents used to slow down after awhile even though the seeds stayed the same. if I cycled my mode on and off (essentially reset it) then my speed came back up. ISP, I think, was throttling me.

[dafelandry]

try finding rapidshare links or any good file hosting website.... I have not used torrents in a solid year and i recieved a certain rom dump (13 links) in under 5 hours.... (i think it was 16 gb or so) depending on what your downloading you can use the free dloads and still get VERY good speeds (sometimes 1.5 MPS)

I know its kind opposite to your question but you would be supprised what simply googling anything with rapidshare at the end will get you

(example: "game title rapidshare")

[u_rebelscum]

What router are you using?  Many are able to understand uPnP to automatically set up port forwarding.  It's a setting to enable in uTorrent.  I think it defaults on, though, so if it's not working already, you'll probably have to do it by hand.  Portward.com has details on many routers.

As hinted at above, some ISPs throttle P2P, others advertise a peak DL rate, but only guarantee a lower "sustained" DL rate.

Also, sometimes uploading slows down DLing, especially if either are close to their max sustained rate.  So some torrents recommend DLing only, then ULing only to get around this.  Others recommend ULing as high as possible to "match" with as many high speed peers as possible (assuming you don't have this limit).  Also, if you have this limit, portforwarding can only connect you to more peers, those that don't have portwarding either; you won't get the "matching" speed boost.

As dafelandry hinted, P2P has more overhead for the DLer than straight http/ftp.  So as long as the http host can support your max bandwidth, you'll actually get the stuff faster with that than P2P.  OTOH, if the host can't, or doesn't have it, P2P is a way to get the most.