# Why bittorrent is soooooo slow???

## Hammett

I wonder this, since I've tried 3 different BitTorrent clients (Azureus, Qbittorrent and rtorrent) and 2 different torrent libs and I can't get any decent torrent speed.

I even shut down my firewall so I was completely exposed to the internet and it didn't get any better.

May it be a kernel problem? Is the only thing I can suspect is not right configured right away....

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## immolo

are they new torrents? I always get my speeds with a new popular ebook or something if they are new does your isp limit bit torrent usage?

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## Hammett

Sure...

As a matter of fact, I have a torrent whith 1000+ peers and 3500+ seeds and I'm barely connected to 10 peers and 20-30 seeds only.

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## Coelacanth

Maybe your ISP is throttling bittorrent traffic. If that's the case using a client that supports encryption might help.

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## Hammett

I know for sure my ISP is not throttling Bittorrent cause in winxp works perfectly.

Now I use rtorrent, but I've used Azureus for long time and I've never had any problem with it.

Could it be a kernel problem? Some options that should be enabled?

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## immolo

are you behind a router or anything? just check the ports match up if you are forwarding them as I have always noticed speeds the other way around (being faster in Linux then XP)

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## Hammett

I'm behind a router, but I totally disabled the router security, so it does not act as a firewall. All my ports are visible from the internet

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## Oliazk

Try using BitTornado it works for me windows and linux allows for a good deal of control also. 

I think it might use the encryption tech. not sure exactly what kind though.

Good luck

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## Hammett

I don't think trying yet another BT client is gonna make the difference. Rather I need to find what's wrong with my box.

Thanks anyways though ^^

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## Ehnvis

I think this has to do with the settings you have in your bittorrent client. And I guess it's the down speed you complain about as you upload at full speed?

Set the upload speed to 70% of your maximum and you should see differences in the download speed, this apply if your on ADSL only.

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## Hammett

I already thought about that. I upload at barely 50% of my upload bandwidth so I don't think that's the problem.

Could it be an amd64 problem related?

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## pdr

I use the curses-based bittorrent (btdownloadcurses.py) on my server (amd64) and if someone out there is willing, I get my full download bandwidth of about 140KBps. I limit upload bandwidth because if I don't it will use full (for my ADSL, about 32KBps) and trying to do anything else, such as ssh into the server from outside, can be extremely bad. So I usually set --max_upload_rate to 25 or even 30.

I set up my linksys router/firewall to allow ports 6881-6999 in when I am torrenting (and port 22 for ssh), although this seems to have questionable effect.

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## Hammett

More weird things... I tryed to connect directly my PC to the cable modem, just to discard entirely the router.

I use DCHP to get my IP from the router, and the router uses DCHP to get the IP address from the ISP.... If I connect directly my PC to the cable-modem, I can't get any IP from DCHP (dhcpd timeout)

Can anyone explain this ? Because I'm getting nuts!

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## tarpman

Probably your ISP uses MAC addresses to track which of its IPs are in use.  Try setting the MAC on your PC to the same as the one on your router (sudo ifconfig eth0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx).

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## Hammett

Thanks for the answer Tarpman.

Well, the problem's still there... I don't know where else to look. The only thing I can think of is some kernel feature or dhcp weird config or so.

Any help is more the appretiated

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