BitTorrent not slow, but users are clueless

[alan]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Tony Lill wrote:

> alan <alan at clueserver.org> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Florin Andrei wrote:
>>
>>> 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".
>>
>> I have been using BitTorrent quite a bit and I have seen pretty iffy
>> performance downloading FC5.
>>
>> I am using the correct ports, my firewall handles it fine, and my ISP
>> does not block.  Other downloads have not been a problem since the
>> last router upgrade.
>>
>> Something else is going on here.
>>
>
> If your client supports it, try limiting your uplink speed. For a 1Mb
> ADSL, about 18kB/s is about right. That will let me get 110kB/s
> download. Without a specific limit, the uplink speed doubles, you drop
> so many packets that the download speed is cut in half.

I have already done that.  I have gotten better performance in the past 
with the same settings and the same client.  Might be the new version of 
the client.

-- 
"Remember there is a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." - Frank Zappa