BitTorrent not slow, but users are clueless

[Florin Andrei]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 13:31 -0500, sean wrote:

> The biggest problem is usually that your upstream speed is limited which 
> will severely reduce your download speed (1).  One common cause is having 
> local firewall (iptables) rules active.  Another is having a router 
> (linksys etc.) which hasn't been configured to allow bittorrent 
> connections (2).

I would venture to say that a combination of these factors is
responsible for most cases of poor performance, even more so that ISP
traffic shaping.

There's plenty of clueless people out there who are behind a broadband
router that's doing NAT, the router has no protocol helper for
BitTorrent and does not forward the BitTorrent ports to the correct
machine behind it - as a result of course the download speed is very
low, yet people complain about BitTorrent per se. lol :-)

Saying "BitTorrent sucks" has a pretty high probability of being
equivalent to "my computer/networking skills suck".

> 2 http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm gives a pretty decent walk through
>   to help you configure your router properly

That document should be linked on the Fedora BitTorrent page at duke.edu

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/