Configure ktorrent for fastest downloads

[Eric Oyen]

A slight addition, with regards to cox.

I use the business class service here, which means that my bandwidth is not the ever present in residential “up to” speed, but is the advertised speed of 65 Mbits/sec. Also, I use a VPN for torrenting over simply because cox, like most other broadband providers) doesn’t like one using a method of file transfer that can be so incredibly abused by those sharing copyrighted content.

Now, since I am only 1 of about 20 users on my node doing business service, instead of residential, I am not suck for bandwidth like all the residential users around me. I also don’t have to worry about overage charges (if you exceed 1 TB a month on residential, it can cost up to $10 per gigabyte over your limit. If you happen to be streaming 4k content via that connection, you will definitely go over by the 23rd day of that 30 day cycle, especially if you are like my room mate and leave the video stream on 24/7.


Now, as for best settings for your torrent client, even the best settings still might not give you peak performance. A lot depends on the health of the swarm (number of seeds >2) and how many leechers there may be. Typically, if you have only a few seeds and a lot of leeches, you won’t be getting any performance out of your torrent client.

Now, some of the best settings I have come up with over the years includes:
Number of active torrents </= 5. The max global connections is 1000 or less and the per torrent connections no higher than 200. Also, I tend to limit both upload and download BW to about 70% of my overall available bandwidth here. I have other reasons for that, including not causing a problem with the video streaming
 That the room mate enjoys. There might be some advanced settings in your torrent client that may also improve performance, but overall, a lot still depends on how many seeds and the level of bandwidth they can feed.

-Eric
From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Dept of Quality of Services.


> On Jun 23, 2019, at 8:27 PM, Jim <azanorak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 6/23/19 2:24 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
>> I find you're only as fast as your 1) home isp connection and 2) torrent peer(s).
> I know this.  I've got 10 Mbits down and 1 up.
>> Sometimes your speed as only good as your isp, particularly depending if your isp is hating on your torrenting.  Comcast has been known to rate limit torrents actively, thus net neutrality debates were born.  I find using CenturyLink, it is always oversubscribed in their local peering, so things tend to be a bit slow at first, but otherwise window up fast to max bandwidth if enough peers.  Cox charges bandwidth overages now, but their service (internet peering) is generally better quality.  I don't like random surprise overages after watching some 4k movies, so I'm now with CL with no caps.
> 
> How fast is your Century Link service?  Are you stuck with dsl or do they offer something faster?  I've heard that many ISPs are imposing data caps now so they can screw people out of more money.
> 
>> You should never, ever get torrents from your direct home IP.  Just don't - you are inviting problems.  Get a reliable, trustworthy vpn service.  This influences again how fast you are downloading, make sure your vpn gives you good speed too.
> I got one of those threatening emails from AT&T saying I've been naughty and listing the torrent in question.  I use a VPN now and get no more nasty emails from the isp.
>> 
>> Almost any residential service, dsl or cable are asynchronous transfer rates, meaning faster to download than upload.  Interesting thing with cable particularly, uploading at capacity tends to influence your downstream rates in bad ways.  If you are maxing out your upstream to seed, your downloads are likely affected in some way.  It's a long answer why, read up on docsis if interested.  Limit your upstream rates in your torrent client/server to a respectable number is the short of this.
>> 
>> Torrents tend to create a _lot_ of packet per seconds and connections  - make sure your router/firewall can handle this.  I've seen torrenting kill enterprise firewalls in session/pps counts.  Connection counts affect memory, and might/will kill a cheapo router.  I see this occasionally with customer "incidents" when doing network/security consulting, and finding someone doing something stupid like installing a torrent client on their work computer as they end up being a top-talker I find with simple source flow counts for *abnormal* traffic.  I've also had roommates kill my firewall doing this, before I find, block, and threaten them with no internet access ever again.
> 
> I used to have a roommate about 10 years ago who bogged down my internet connection with his stupid online shoot em up games.  I couldn't download anything.  I'd connect to the router and see that he was downloading little but maxing out the upload speed. It must have been something to do with that docsis issue you mentioned.  I fixed the problem by setting a limit on his upload speed so he only got half of what was available.  He complained when implementing this change kicked him offline for a minute or so, but not after that
> 
>> I don't find a lot of other optimization of clients are necessary.  I use a transmission-remote server and otherwise feed everything through that as a server appliance from numerous clients on the lan (desktop, laptop, phone, sometimes remote), and all torrent collection show up as from an eu country via my vpn service.  Above guidelines are quite good for my purposes.
>> 
>> -mb
> 
> I use protonvpn.  It's cheap and it works, and i don't get anymore nasty emials from my ISP.  Thanks for your reply and also thanks to everyone else who replied.
> 
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