Naff Torrent speeds and torrents kill internet! Help!?

Yucca · 21 Mar 2008 at 23:17

Ok i have used utorrent for torrent downloads for a long time now and never had a problem. Ive have Tiscali broadband for years and although its not the best its not bad.

I have recently (about 3 months ago) set up wireless broadband in the house so that my sister can browse the Internet on her Laptop while i can use the net also on my PC. She uses the wireless connection and my PC is plugged directly into the router so speed and connection etc is never/should never be a problem.

Now the Internet is fine, seem to work ok and if i do a test on the adsl guide website it tells me i have the correct bandwidth download speed so all is good.

However im back from Uni for 3 weeks and thought id download some torrents via utorrent (works fine at uni).

But i seem to get max download speed of about 20-30k/s through utorrent and thats when i have about 5 torrents downloading all with loads of seeders.

Further, when i have utorrent downloading, at crappy speeds, i cant get Internet pages to open at all and neither can my sister on her laptop.

I dont know why this is. The connection is obviously working as utorrent is downloading. And it cant be a lack of bandwidth as its downloading at such bad speeds anyway.

So my question is 1) why is utorrent giving me such bad speeds and what can i do about it and 2) why is torrent downloading killing my normal Internet usage?

Any help would be much appreciated.

tolien · 21 Mar 2008 at 23:27

Probably utorrent opening too many connections. Making sure uPnP is enabled, or forwarding the port it uses, should improve speeds.

jimbofett · 21 Mar 2008 at 23:39

test the ports are forwarded properly

Yucca · 22 Mar 2008 at 00:09

It wasn't forwarded properly. I just followed a guide to set up a static ip and forward the port to the router.

Learn something new every day huh!

And hell yea, its made a massive difference already in just a few clicks!! I'm getting 50k/s now! Not great but shows its working!

This is how happy i am!!

And it seems to have solved my problem with utorrent killing the Internet to.

Just out of interest though, i understand how forwarding the port has made my dl speeds increase and how not having it forwarded could result in naff download speeds.

But why was it stopping my Internet pages from loading!? :confused:

Tosk · 22 Mar 2008 at 00:24

utorrent can open up way to many contentions per tracker and most routers
cant take the traffic passing thro it.

to stop this just lower the max connections and connections per tracker
under the Preferences> BitTorrent

also set the protocol encryption to enabled. that helps as well, with the incoming
legacy connection ticked.

Tripnologist · 22 Mar 2008 at 02:15

I have a similar problem myself.. Except that it doesn't matter if I'm seeding/downloading or not. The moment I open utorrent, my connection just dies. Strangely, the other computers on the same connection can still download and/or access the Internet just fine. I can't figure it out. It never used to do this. Also, when I have a good torrent(s) going, I can still reach up to 1.6MB/s download speeds.

asim18 · 22 Mar 2008 at 03:28

Yucca said:
But i seem to get max download speed of about 20-30k/s through utorrent and thats when i have about 5 torrents downloading all with loads of seeders.

Whats your internet speed? for all we know you could have a 512kb/s connection, in which case 50 KBps would be fine

Also, make sure you've got LOADS of seeds. I know a private tracker which has many torrents with 100+ seeders and NO leechers at all. Those torrents usually max my connection and i get a full 1.5 mbps download. They should also max your connection out.

Yucca · 26 Mar 2008 at 15:16

Ok i am supposed to be getting 5.3mbps connection as this is what Tiscali tell me i am on and this is what i get if i do any tests on websites to check my line speed.

But im still only getting about 100kb/s through Utorrent. And i have tried downloading torrents with loads of seeds and still dont seem to get great speeds. I have 6 Meg broadband at uni and download similar torrents and get about 300-400k/s.

And also, every time i have utorrent open it slows down the use of Internet pages to a snail. And i dont understand why.

Any ideas?

doozer · 26 Mar 2008 at 16:52

Are you making sure you are limiting your uploads so you don't hog all the upload bandwith.

That can cause pages not to load if the full upload is being used.

Although reading on various forums tiscali have lots of problems during peak hours.

You could always test this by downloading in the day and then trying again at night to see if you get similar speeds.