We’ve all heard people ranting about how great BitTorrent is. Until a few days ago, I was in the dark as to why people were so excited. I had never seen download speeds greater than about 10k. Limitless bandwidth? Ha!
That was true, until last week when I had a burning need to download a particular file via BitTorrent. Unwillingly, I started the download and frowned at the 24 hour estimated download time and the abysmal speed. On a whim I decided to ask Google how I could improve BitTorrent download speeds. Google, obligingly, returned this page.
The solution, as it turns out, is rather simple. Basically, BitTorrent uses the ports between 6881 and 6889 for high speed transfers. If your firewall has these blocked you’re not going to see very high transfer speeds.
I happened to be behind a Linksys router. After pestering the owner a bit I was able to extract the logon information and open the ports up. Subsequent downloads were much faster. I was seeing 100k and higher download speeds. This brought my download time to under an hour. Woo hoo!
So, if you’re seeing slow BitTorrent download speeds, you need to open these ports up on your firewall.
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "Improving your BitTorrent Download Speed" (8)
Doug, if you reduce the upload speed in the settings for any given torrent you’ll find a speed increase. Also consider downloading one torrent at a time.
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Paul Stamatiou has a number of BitTorrent/Azureus HOWTOs at his site. They are very good.
How To: Configure Azureus (http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/02/how-to-configure-azureus/)
Part 2: Azureus Optimisation and Plugins (http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/09/part-2-azureus-optimization-and-plugins/)
Part 3: Azureus Anonymity (http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/14/part-3-azureus-anonymity/)
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Theres a number of things that slow your torrents. I used http://www.speedyourslowtorrents.com to get my cracking at 100kb/s…yay! Good article
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I’m behind college firewall and to get torrent work itself would be a dream come true. How do I improve the speed without having to talk to the administrator about opening the ports?
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This thig is slow as always,
but thanks for help.
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What do you put for Port Map?
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ggggggggg
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g
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