bittorrent speed way too low, what possible causes?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 21:12:57 +0200,
  Jan Welker <jan.welker at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please forget what I just wrote. :-)
> 
> On 6/1/07, Jan Welker <jan.welker at gmail.com> wrote:
> >If your upload rate is to high it has an influence on the download, too.

Actually you can have problems where a maxed out uplink (particularly
when the uplink capacity is lower than the downlink's) is a bottleneck
for a downlink. What happens is that ack packets start getting delayed and lost
and then the download may pause waiting on them. Using traffic shaping to
manage your link can alleviate most of the problems with this.