hey everyone, ok just a few quick questions regarding bit torrents if you dont mind:

1........... what do you think is the best bittorrent client to use and why? im using utorrent at the moment but its very very slow, i might try something else.

2........... i have 2mb broadband, what sort of download speeds should i be getting on average?

3........... what is port forwarding and how the hell can i do it?, a mate of mine was messing with his router options and utorrent and did something with the ports and said his download speed increased a great amount (i dont even know what a port is..........) anuy thoughts here

hope you guys can give me some good advise

cheers

monty

My favourite client is Azureus, by ppl's tastes may differ.

'Port forwarding' is like this - all different P2P apps need to communicate with other ppl's computers and in the case of BitTorrent, different trackers. These communications are carried out using 'Ports' which are numbered from 1024-65535. So, say that your Emule tells you that in the Options, it's using TCP Port 45366 ,and UDP Port 56334, this means that you have to tell your firewall to allow access on these ports.

Firewalls normally block all incoming connections by default. When this is the case, a lot of P2P apps either will not work, or will work, but very slowly. So you have to go into your firewall, and allow 'Port Forwarding' or 'Open' the right ports. Just look in the 'Options' bit of your P2P app, it'll tell you what ports it's using.

The reason that some ppl haven't had to do this is because of something called UPnP, or 'Universal Plug and Play' - nearly all modern P2P apps support this protocol, which allows the P2P apps to automatically communicate with your firewalls, and to request that ports be opened as needed.

Hope this helps - feel free to ask me any further questions if not.

1. I use Utorrent too, it is as good as Azureus which used to be my favourite but use less resources which is good-no client is any faster than others. Limit your upload speed to about 75% of your max upload rate.

2. I have 4mb and get about 450KB/s so you should get half that-but only if you are downloading from a private torrent site and the torrent has a lot of seeders.

3. Portforward.com is the best place to find out as enviro says. You need to do this if you have a router to get decent speeds.

edit.
Actually I had to do it with my old Belkin router but I haven't done it with my new Linksys and it seems fine without it.

and by the way if you have a d-link router then just don't expect any p2p or torrent stuff to work 100% due to badly written drivers which will bring down your connection every couple of hours and result in frequent crashes of your router and whole system. I saved £20 buying the d-link instead of the linksys and I have probably wasted ten times that in terms of lost productivity rebooting the frigging thing and searching the net for a fix. cheap shit!

What's been said above is true - no BT client program is faster than any other - if anyone has had one that seems so, it will be because of port forwarding issues. (ie one client using a different port range by default, or a slightly different implementation of UPnP)

It's actually better to not use UPnP, in my experience - it's best to just find out what ports your P2P apps are using, and then just permanently open them in the firewall & router. Then it's done. Finito.

UPnP is handy, and all, but I've notices that, long-term, especially on Winblow$ machines, that it can be unreliable, and some routers are prone to crashing and locking up when they're hammered with UPnP requests all the time.

It's also a good idea to go into the 'Options' section of your P2P apps, and to change the port numbers to something other than what they're set to by default. For example, lots of BitTorrent apps used the ports 6881-9, and these ports have then been blocked or throttled by ISPs - you can choose any port number you like, so long as it's between 1024-65535. Also, bear in mind that there are *two* different kinds of ports - UDP & TCP - nearly all P2P apps use both kinds, and require at least one of each to be opened.

Edit: The crashing router problem that tom o'rite refers to above will, no doubt, be due to UPnP, which as I mentioned, is badly set-up in some routers - you can avoid the expense of forking out for another router by manually setting the Port Forwarding, rather than letting UPnP deal with it. Far more reliable.

1 Azurues -- most options and preffered clients of groups who seed the best latest material, aint got the client some the groups will boot ya and not entertain ya

2 Hmm well i would reckon should be gettin around 150k a sec easy on 2mb connection but its seeder/leecher/swarm dependant, more of them sending at higher speeds more u will get qucker, a capped upload speed effects download speed also, upload 2 slow = slow download ....upload 2 fast = slow download aswell at times as yer PCs using all its resources to seed chunks of the torrent as quick as it can...a balance is needed, middle of the road upload = average to fast download imo

3 Each router/modem uses ports, torrents clients also use ports as does the network to transport the data to specific ports, if the port foward option aint set torrents shall never work correctly, the ports need to be fowarded in order for it to use the torrent ports and that makes things all the faster

NAT errors come about when ports aint fowarded, azureus will allow u to do a simple NAT test on a port number and see if its open and ready fer action, green = good and means ya ports are fowarded.

Portfoward.com should cover the steps for each individual router/modem with a step by step guide on how to create port foward set ups or NAT rules that allow u to use the correct ports, or even change them to a non standard port for even better results.

6881 is the port torrents use as standard, it works fine but some ISPs tend to feck with it as they also know its being used for torrents, simple case of using one of the 1000s available ports, port forward works better also with static IPs but most UK home internet users are incapable of setting up a static IP on a residential internet account, BT for one charge for static IPS and only usually available on business broadband accounts, so if u come across the static IP section in portfoward.com some folks can use it, most cant, and should skip the section alltogether.

So simply create a rule that fowards the port u want to use for torrents, and the torrent client will work better as its listening to specific ports for information being sent to them, once this is set up it all works a lot smoother

ohh yeah and if any client has DHT like azurues does {distributed database scraper pulgin} u gotta disable it in options or it fecks with loads of trackers

actually I do manually set up port forwarding, it's just that azureus & soulseek both seem to individually try to open more connections than the router can handle

u using xp service pack 2?

it might actually be yer tcp connections causin the prob, xp has a system wide limit of ten similtaneous tcp half open connections, broadband and torrents can quickly fill n flood this q and make yer net connection grind to a halt, would seem routers crashed and only works when u reboot/reset the connection.

Theres a number of patches of third party tcp half open connections available allowing u to increase the system wide limit from ten to a number of your choice, mine currently sits around 100 on my xp box and no longer crashes my connection after the client trys to open say 200 seeds

might be simular prob to what ur gettin

without a doubt azureus with a few tweaks including lvllord patch closely followed by bittornado

Also, I would add that it's best to set the upload speed limits especially to around 60-75% of what you're connection is supposed to handle. I.e. If you've got a 256Kbit (32K p/s) upload speed, I would set this in the Options to about 192Kbit (24K p/s) this is beacuse if you flood your upload pipe, it stops your machine being able to acknowledge received packets from other sources, and can slow your connection right down.

You can manually set within the program the amount of ports that're allowed to be open at any one time - have a hunt around in 'Options' - it's all there.

ooh, sounds interesting. Yes, I'm on SP2. What patches would you advise using, and how can I determine the maximum number of connections I can make without causing smoke to come out of my computer, please? I've been unnecessarily stressed about this for a while now.

Trial and error is yer way ahead with the connections, i increased mine gradually from 10 > 25 > 50 > 100 and each increase seemed to improve its performace

check this out should help

http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1497

if u goggle the tcp connections thing u will find the patches for changing the limits

http://www.lvllord.de/

cheers- you the man, I'm going to check that out now....

i have 2 internet lines, one adsl and one cablemodem.

i use utorrent on one line and azureus on the other, altho i think azureus is a better client, utorrent is also excellent.

utorrent is better than azureus on lower spec pc's because it is less resource hungry.




this greatly depends on alsorts of things but on private trackers with well seeded torrents, you should be hitting 200kbps on whatever client youre using.

the client does NOT determine the speed of download!!!!!!




firstly, are you on adsl or cablemodem?

either way you MUST (i repeat, MUST) setup port forwarding or your downloads will ALWAYS be slow and furthermore you will not be uploading to the swarm and this will piss off other members in the swarm.

if using cablemodem, this setup is easy but a little more complex with adsl and routers.

you will need to enable the port you forward on your firewall.

thanks for all the good replies guys, ok to answer some of your questions, i am using:

Windows XP SP2
Mcafee internet security 2006
I have 2mb ADSL broadband
Linksys WAG200N-UK Gateway (new model)

ok i have checked my router model in portforward.com and its not listed i m guessing because its a new model.

i have checked options in utorrent program and it says that incoming connections are coming in from port 58635

my download speeds are really crap at the moment and the router keeps crashing and i have to reboot regularly.

ok so id like to know how can i open this port in my linksys router and also do i have to do anything in my mcafee firewall options.

cheers peeps

monty

also remember that with any torrent you can only download at the same speed of the seeds/peers upload speed sometimes it will be slow and nothing will change this
Also some help with port forwarding [url=http://portforward.com/networking/static-xp.htm]
Click here!
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i also recomend turning dht off aswell as this srews with everything

ok so do i turn off both DHT options in "preferences" in utorrent mate?


ok i went into my linksys wireless router and have 3 options:

1. single port forwarding
2. port range forwarding
3. port range triggering

each of the 3 options give the option of enabling a port number, am i right into thinking that i would enter the port number the same as my incoming connection port number in utorrent? but its asking for internal and external port numbers and do i select tcp or udp to open the port for torrents. And lastly its asking for ip address so where can i get this. i just need to know how to do the above and this will open a port dedicted to torrents?

hope this all makes sense people, im well cained here..................

thanks, you are all good people

peace

monts

You wanna use "Single Port Forwarding" - it uses TCP as the backbone for communicating, and another UDP port is used for DHT, and other things to do with scraping etc.

It should tell you in the program options which one is TCP and which one is UDP, but like I said above, TCP is the main one.

advice from mr mom

download speeds using torrents depend on the amount of people seeding that file - hence the more people seeding = greater download speeds. as for forwarding ports go to portforwarding.com look for your router name and follow the instructions.

also try bit tornado which is good software - i use utorrent and bit tornado

mr mom

went to port forwarding mate but my router isnt listed maybe because its fairly new

yayyyyyyyy, finally managed to forward my port, set upload limit to 70% as recommended by you lads, disabled UPnP as recommended by the portforward.com tutorial. tested port in utorrent and its working perfectly. my ip address was 192.168.1.100 (not sure if this is static though or dynamic), and as told by scribble internal and external port numbers were the same,

so lets hope my router will stop crashing now, will report back later.

just one more thing people, shall i enable or dsable DHT networking in utorrent?

well anyway a big thank you for all you guys that replied to my thread, i hope it will be of use to others

peace

monty

192.168.1.100 will be the address of your router, and it'll be static.

Any addresses that look like 192.168.x.x are 'private' addresses for use in local networks - they have no meaning in the outside internet.

Glad you got it sorted out, bud.

Edit: DHT means that you can still continue downloading even if the tracker goes down - I always keep it on, TBH. I think that some ppl say to turn it off because they want to maintain 'private' swarms that can only be accessed through the tracker. You need to port-forward a UDP port if you wanna use DHT, anyhoo.

well played sorting out the port forwarding on an adsl line, thats the tricky part over and done with!

re dht...

keep dht on if youre using only public trackers like isohunt, torrentspy, mininova, etc..

if you start using any private trackers (where you will get better download speeds generally) you will be required to turn dht off or you could face being banned from that private tracker.

private trackers are ones like demonoid (most of the time), uknova, bitmetv, torrentleech, and others...

to get on to private trackers you either have to keep on trying to sign up to find a time when they have new membership slots, which isnt always easy, or be invited by another member.

well i have jusy woken up and checked my downloads and the router has yet again crashed (i left DHT on by the way)

any ideas folks?

the port check in utorrent still says that my port is working correctly so why is my router still crashing?



monty

Try and lower the amount of open ports that you have open at any one time. You can set this in the Options of the BitTorrent client - it's prolly trying to open too many ports, and it's doing the router's head in.

Alterntately, see if you can get the latest firmware for your router, and install it - you may have an old version installed.

cheers scribble, ok im in utorrent options but cant see "number of open ports"

can you tell me where to check this exactly and how to lower it. i can see:

global max number of connections is set at 750
max number of connected peers per torrent is set at 100
number of upload slots per torrent is set at 8


should i change any of these numbers or do they seem ok

will try to update router firmware also

cheers mate

Try 500 for the Global amount.
Try 75 for the max number of connected peers per torrent.
Maybe try 5 for the number of upload slots per torrent.

What are your connection speeds?

Edit: I mean what is the spec of your broadband connection supposed to be? I see it's 2MBit down, what's it up?

ok mate, i have changed the 3 numbers as you recommended above,my upload speeds are upto 256Kbps according to my isp website.

by the way in utorrent settings i have max number of active torrents set to 8 and have max number of downloads set to 8 also, is this ok?

RE the firmware update for my linksys driver, when i go into my router and go to firmware update its asking me to sleect which file to update but im not sure where to find this driver file, i have looked in C drive in program files but cant see a linksys folder and i cant identify it in the driver folder either, any ideas?

when i google "download linksys lastest drivers" i go to linksys.com but it says that driver downloads are for US products only

my router model is linksys WAG300N-uk and the firmware im using is 1.01.00

thanks for all your help so far everybody

I, personally would change the max number of active torrents to 4, and the max number of downloads set to 2 or 3 - this should spread your precious bandwidth about a bit better, and also stress your router a bit less.

I'll look into the other thing and I'll let you know what I find out.

Edit: Here's the firmware off the Linksys UK site, version 1.01.01 (7/07/2006):

http://www-uk.linksys.com/servlet/Satellit...p;ssbinary=true

And here's the 1.01.01 'Upgrade Utility', you might not need both, or you may just need this one, check it out:

http://www-uk.linksys.com/servlet/Satellit...p;ssbinary=true

These links should work for you - let me know if they don't.

I've used them all. Azureus with the safe peer plugins etc. These days I've down graded and just stick to Bitlord. At the end of the day if they want to bust you they will. They will get the log from your isp. The only way to try and stay safe isgoing through a proxy and changing your ip address. Change your mac address while you're at it with SMAC.
A mate got written to cos he was downloading some star trek movie in the past. MGM or Warners wrote to him, it was funny...the laeeter was scary.....stopped him downloading though ! (the pussy )

My advice is hold back on downloading the blockbuster type movies as soon / day before they come out and leave it a few days to be safer.

Try downloading through newsgroups
Or try downloading DC++ which is an excellant direct connect free program found at soundforge. try it, you'll like it !
Mirc.... its ok but a bit dead these days....

Some peope don't think its fair to use limiting programs like NETLIMITER but hey, thats your choice. The less you seed the less likely you are to get a nick and the less attention you draw.

On the torrent programs always check your upload setting. Don't have it set to max, otherwise you might find you won't have enough upload bandwidth yourself for the program to check for seeds from time to time and you'll get bad download speeds. 25 kb/s will do you or a bit lower. experiment.

The chance of getting busted is so minute, and like you say, only then even likely if you download big companies' blockbusters as *soon* as the files appear online, and even then, only if they're in the middle of doing a big letter-writing scare campaign, that you might as well just be courteous, and seed genorously, or at least until the ratio is 1.5. *At least*.

ok quick update folks, i have updated my router firmware (thanks for that scribble) and have been playing around with the settings, router hasnt crashed lately and seems to be a bit quicker downloading.

i wanted to ask you guys what would be the optimal number of movies/files to download at any one time?, im currently downloading 8, is this too much, i mean would it make download speeds inefficient?

cheers for all yer help folks

monty

If I were you, I'd swap to Azeureus. I have used Utorrent happily for over a year, then tried Azeureus and found it far more effective at finding seeds & leeches than Utorrent.

Regarding numbers of downloads - if I'm downaloading music, I may have 5 or 6 on the go at once, but when downloading films 3 or 4 is my maximum - remember you have to upload as much as you download, so if you have too many at once it will take you longer to upload the required amount.

8 is *far* too many - I'd set the maximum number of active torrents to maybe 4 or 5 with the maximum number of simultaneous downloads to 2 or 3. The stuff will finish quicker that way, and then you can start downloading the next one.