Torrent is now the most widely used form of sharing. Though there are sites which allow you to upload your file and share, they have some or other restrictions. Sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload often delete illegal content on report. Torrents don’t have such restrictions. You find many things which are not available via HTTP download. But as all things have some postive and negative, so do torrents.

It is very difficult to get good speed or high speed download. And morever it’s difficult to maintain it. You may get a very high download speed at start or in between but may last for a moment. It’s not stable and nothing can be done. But following are some tricks you can use to increase your download speed and get maximum out of your connection. I’ll use utorrent as my bittorrent client as it’s the best.

1. TCP/IP patch for Max half-open connection

Often this thing is misunderstood. It will not always increase your speed. Unless you are getting 4226 errors this patch is useless. check the event viewer. Right click on My Computer->Manage->Event Viewer->System. Check for 4226 errors. If you get them often then apply this patch. Else this patch is useless. You can get this patch from Here
Then configure utorrent allow 50-100 max half-open TCP connections
uTorrent: Options > Preferences > Advanced options > net.max_halfopen
Use a value less than you set during the patch. If you set 100 during patch then set it as 90.

2. Check for Number of seeders

Whenever you download a tracker file check for the number of seeders. The more the seeders the faster you can download. This may not be true always. But 99.9% of the time this turns out to be true.

3. Use different search engines

This is similar to above trick. Download for the search engine where you get most of the seeders for the tracker file. Not all search engines provide same number of seeds. I use Isohunt. You may find something else giving more seeds or better.

4. Avoid Private trackers

I’m not against them. These trackers provide torrents for private users only. They have limitations of which ratio limitation is most common. You have to keep some ratio else you are banned. This surely affects your download speeds as you have to upload and keep the ratio. Not always you get good speeds there. So as far as possible avoid them.

5. Setting Maximum upload\download speeds

Setting these speeds regulates the bandwidth. If you allow full upload speed then there will be nothing left for download. A value of around 70-80% of maximum is considered as good. If you have Max upload speed of 50KB\s then set this to 40KB\s

utorrent->Preferences->Connections->Global Maximum Upload speed

You can also set separate upload speed for each torrent to override this. this may be required when one of torrent is taking too much and giving nothing.

Now i don’t suggest to set Maximum Download speed. This is because the maximum seed is never reached. You can rest assured. So it’s better to keep this value set to zero which implies maximum download speed.

6. Turn On Protocol Encryption

P2P downloads consume most of the bandwidth for ISP. Hence they limit the traffic flow by detecting the P2P connection flow. When you enable encryption it becomes difficult for ISP to detect the traffic and hence they cannot limit this.

There may be several other guides telling you to portforward or some other nonsense. Go through them and try if you get some success. The above six steps are tested and worked for me. hence I thought of sharing this with you. If you find something more to speed up then do reply here.

• So Easy Difficulties