Suffering from poor torrent download speed? I know your ISP sucks, but you can do some tricks to increase torrent download speed, and they are not technical, just some minor tweaks. Personally, I know how torrent download speed matters, if I like a particular movie, then I’ll download that movie’s trailer in 1080p before watching the movie, I used to see it carefully whether it suits my interest or not. When I told this to my friend, he said, “Macha, by the time you finish downloading that trailer, I would have completed downloading that movie itself.” I tried hard to smile but I couldn’t. 😛 So you see, download speed matters, at least it should give you a decent download speed to watch a movie before its second part comes.
Below we have some easy tips to optimize/improve/increase torrent download speed. These usual tips apply to almost any P2P client you are using.
Tips To Increase Torrent Download Speed
1. Choose The Right BitTorrent Client
The first ultimate step is to pick the right BitTorrent Client. Because not all the clients have updated and latest technologies to handle P2P. You have many clients out there, to name a few, like uTorrent, Vuze, BitComet or the BitTorrent client itself. Just make sure these are compatible with your existing Operating System.
2. Limit Your Upload Rate
Seriously you can be generous by seeding. But if you are in an urgent situation then you can limit your upload rate. Because unlimited upload rate hits the download rate too. You don’t need to disable uploading, just find the optimal upload speed and set the upload limit.
3. Good Number of Seeds and Peers
Unless that torrent file has a good number of seeds and peers, you won’t be able to get that file quickly. It is always better to download a file which has many seeders. For example,
File 1: Indian Blogging Life (By Pradeep Kumar) (.mp4) 1.4GB (600 Seeds | 400 Peers)
File 2: Indian Blogging Life (By Pradeep Kumar) (.mp4) 1.4GB (5 Seeds | 4 Peers)
Obviously, though you can download both the files, but the “File 1” will have better speed because of the good number of seeders. You can also refer the below picture.
So it is essential to find a torrent file with a good number of seeds and peers.
4. Use Different Port
The default port for BitTorrent transfers is port 6881, especially with some clients using different ports within the range of 6881-6999. All P2P clients allow you to change the port number used for BitTorrent transfers. You can make this change in the settings option or preferences option. You can also set this using a command-line parameter. Also make sure that “Randomize port each start” checkbox is not checked, it will be hectic to see the port change every time you open the torrent client.
5. ISP Throttling
If your ISP is throttling (Bandwidth throttling is the intentional slowing of internet service by an internet service provider) your BitTorrent traffic, then you might face slow Torrent Download Speed. Vuze Wiki has the list of ISPs that normally throttles your traffic.
For this, you can encrypt your torrents. By this, you can prevent your ISP from throttling your torrent traffic. You can enable Protocol Encryption for preventing.
6. Get Through The Firewall
If you are using a Firewall, then it might block your P2P ports thus causing the downloads to slow down. It can block all the ports used by P2P clients. You can use a home router or firewall and manually configure them to accept these ports. You will find the option “Port Range Forwarding” useful for this; it allows the admin to direct the traffic to required ports. To be honest, Firewalls hate P2P; you can just disable it and use something like Zone Alarm for a while.
7. Do Not ‘Force Start’ Your Torrents
I always wondered what this option does; it doesn’t make the download start smoother but damages it. Force Start is a way to start torrents to bypass queue settings and seeding priority settings, by this your overall download speed will suffer. Mostly users use this option so that their torrents does not get queued.
So if you don’t need to force start your torrents, you can better avoid it.
8. Protect Torrent From Failing Trackers
If your download is getting stuck, then it could also be due to failing trackers. Failing trackers? That means the tracker is stopped functioning due to reasons like the torrent deleted from trackers or the trackers died perhaps. They might also experience some downtime. Sometimes torrents are removed from a tracker if they are older than a year. There are many such reasons, unfortunately.
To prevent this, you have two ways:
- 1. Use Multi-tracker Torrents: You can add multiple trackers to a torrent. Then if you are adding three trackers, the second one will take over if the first one fails.
- 2. Enable DHT: DHT stands for “Distributed Hash Table”. It acts as a peer-to-peer tracker. Supported by all the leading p2p clients.
9. Use a VPN (or) Proxy
Just like Firewalls, ISPs don’t like torrents either. They just restrict them, and if they see you downloading torrents, they probably limit your net speed. That’s where VPNs come to play. VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a tool which can confuse your Internet Service Provider (ISP), by this they cannot tell the difference between normal traffic and torrent traffic. They establish a virtual point-to-point connection, thus providing traffic encryption. Your ISP will have no idea what you are actually doing and they can no longer put restrictions on your torrent downloads. There are several popular VPNs like HideMyAss, Kepard, etc.
10. Remove Unnecessary Files
In the case of some downloads, you may end up downloading some unnecessary files. But, some clients like uTorrent allow us to view all the individual files of a download. You can unselect some unnecessary files in a download and increase the speed of your download. Familiarizing yourself with all the settings in your BitTorrent client can also help you in managing your torrent downloads correctly.
11. Upgrade Your BroadBand Plan or Optimize Your Net Speed
That’s obvious, isn’t it? Unless you have a good broadband connection, you won’t be able to have a downloading speed. Check the maximum download and upload speeds allowed by your ISP since they have specific bandwidths for them. Test your Internet Connection Speed, and you can roughly calculate what your download speed will be. Some tips to make the best use of your internet connection:
- 5 Simple Steps To Faster Broadband Connection
- HOW TO: Get The Best From Slow Internet Connection
Technically speaking, 10th and 11th might not be good tips, but they are something you should always keep in mind nevertheless. If you have any other easy-still-technical tips to increase torrent download speed, feel free to share them in the comments below.
Thanks for the list – indeed useful for many. Here are 3 points I want to share.
1] I think, limiting the upload speed doesn’t help — in fact, the more you reduce allowed upload speed; the download speed is deceased in proportion despite available hi-speed spots. That’s what I have experienced many a times.
2] Enabling randomizing the port. Most of the times, ISPs block certain ports if your connection is using bandwidth on specific ports — to decrease chances of security breach & bandwidth leeching. So — its a good practice to use random ports
3] Choosing torrents with high seeders & less leechers ratio. This automatically helps seed less; get fastest download rate & eventually uses significantly less upload speed.
Hope this help.
Do correct me if something’s missing/wrong or needs update in my info.
Cheers 🙂
Thanks for your helpful information
the trick of upload limit worked for me can u post some blog on data card speed increasing
Wow, good tips about torrent download speed. I really appreciate your hard working for exploring new ideas. Keep it up.