Slow Internet can be annoying. Learn how to fix slow download and upload speed on Windows 10 by following quick easy steps. This is the best guide for faster downloads on uTorrent 3.5.3. Are your uTorrent downloads going way too slow for you? Check out this simple guide to help you speed up your uTorrent and shows you.
BitTorrent networking is the most popular form of modern P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. Since 2006, BitTorrent sharing has been the primary means for users to trade software, music, movies, and digital books online. To download torrents, you need a special P2P file sharing client such as BitTorrent Web.
BitTorrent refers to both the name of the technology and the original client created for exchanging torrents. The original BitTorrent client is now called BitTorrent Classic.
What Are BitTorrents?
BitTorrents (also known as torrents) work by downloading small bits of files from many different web sources at the same time. A few torrent search providers charge users a fee for their service, but torrent clients and torrents themselves are free to download.
While the use of BitTorrent clients is legal, downloading and uploading songs, movies, or TV shows is a violation of copyright law in many jurisdictions.
Torrents Vs. Traditional File Sharing
BitTorrent clients are different from other file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Shareaza in a few ways:
- Torrent networking doesn't require a subscription or account with any service.
- Torrents filter out corrupted and dummy files, ensuring that downloads contain only what they claim to contain.
- Torrent clients encourage users to share ('seed') their complete files, while simultaneously penalizing users who don't share ('leechers').
- Torrents can achieve download speeds over 1.5 megabits per second.
- Torrent code is open-source and ad-free, so no single person profits from file sharing.
How BitTorrent Sharing Works
Torrent sharing utilizes techniques called 'swarming' and 'tracking,' which allows users to download many small bits from many different sources at once.
- Swarming means splitting large files into hundreds of smaller 'bits' and then sharing those bits across a 'swarm' of dozens of linked users.
- Tracking occurs when specific servers help swarm users find each other.
Swarm members use special Torrent client software to upload, download, and reconstruct the many file bits into complete usable files. Special .torrent text files act as pointers during this whole process, helping users find other users to swarm with, and enforcing quality control on all shared files. Because this format compensates for bottleneck points, it is actually faster than downloading a large file from a single source.
While older file sharing programs like Kazaa rely on publisher servers to dish out files, torrent users do all the file serving. Torrent users voluntarily upload their file bits to their swarm without going through a centralized service. Download speed is controlled by torrent tracking servers, which monitor all swarm users. If you share, tracker servers will reward you by increasing your allotted swarm bandwidth (sometimes up to 1500 kilobits per second). If you leech and limit your upload sharing, tracking servers will choke your download speeds, sometimes to as slow as 1 kilobit per second.
Make Torrenting Safer With a VPN
What You Need to Download Torrents
BitTorrent swarming requires five major ingredients:
- A BitTorrent client
- A tracker server
- A .torrent text file that points to the movie/song/file you want to download
- A torrent search engine that helps you find .torrent text files
- A specially-configured Internet connection with port 6881 opened on the server/router to allow torrent file trading.
If you use a hardware router or software firewall, you may need to set up your router/firewall to trust BitTorrent data.
How to Download BitTorrents
- Use a torrent search engine, such as RARGB, to find .torrent text files.
- Download the desired .torrent file to your computer.Most search engines will return multiple files of the same movie/song/etc. Note the size and quality of each file before making a selection to pick the best version.
- Open the .torrent file in your torrent client of choice.
- The torrent client software will automatically communicate with a tracker server and scour the internet for swarms of other users who have the same exact .torrent file. Once seeders have been found, the client software then begins the transfer.
It can take hours or even days to download large files such as movies. Fortunately, if you need to turn off your computer during this time, you can resume downloading from where you left off.
Once the transfer is complete, leave your torrent client software running to share your completed files with other users and increase your upload/download ratio. Best bootable antivirus rescue disk.
Consider purchasing an extra hard drive to store the files you download.
Some torrent users commonly experience slow download speeds, and a number of factors could contribute to that problem. One possibly overlooked reason has to do with the ports on which the P2P traffic is operating.
Since a particular BitTorrent port has to be open on both the router and the firewall to facilitate incoming as well as outgoing traffic, users who have both of these might not be using the correct settings to get the most out of their downloads.
The issue is having a firewall that's blocking incoming BitTorrent connections that are needed to share files. Given the load-balancing and swarming nature of BitTorrent, clients unable to take incoming requests for uploads are usually allowed less bandwidth for downloads.
What Is the Best Port for Torrenting?
A torrent client sets up a network resource called a port that allows other BitTorrent clients to connect to it. Each port possesses a unique number called the TCP port number. The client normally associates the 6881 port.
However, if this port is busy for some reason, it will instead try successively higher ports (6882, 6883, and so on, up to 6999). In order for outside BitTorrent clients to reach the client, they have to be able to traverse your network through the port that the client is using.
The router and the firewall both determine whether or not this action is possible since both can be set to open and block ports. For instance, if the client has assigned port 6883 for uploading data but the firewall or router, or both, is blocking that port, traffic can't move through it in order to share torrent data.
How to Speed Up BitTorrent Clients
Most firewall programs let you choose which ports can be open and closed. Similarly, you can set up port forwarding on a router so that it will accept the traffic through the designated port and then forward those requests to the computer that's running the torrent client.
Utorrent Slow Download Fix
For BitTorrent, many home users set up port forwarding on the TCP range 6881–6889. These ports must be directed to the computer running the BitTorrent client. If more than one computer on the network might run BitTorrent, a different range like 6890–6899 or 6990–6999 can be used for each. Remember that BitTorrent uses ports in the 6881–6999 range only.
The router, firewall software, and torrent client all have to agree on the port that's used for BitTorrent traffic. In other words, even if the router and client software are configured to use the same port, the firewall could still be blocking it and preventing traffic.
Other Factors That Slow Down Torrenting
Torrent Download Slowed Down
- Some ISPs throttle or even completely block P2P traffic. If your ISP does this, you might consider using an online torrent client like Put.io so that the traffic is seen as regular HTTP traffic, not BitTorrent.
- Another way to stop your ISP from blocking P2P traffic is to access the internet through a VPN service that supports torrents.
- Your physical or wireless connection might be the problem. If you're downloading torrents from a wireless computer, consider using a wired connection or sitting in a room just next to the wireless router to mitigate any signal degradation.
- Low available bandwidth on the network is another possible reason for torrents to upload or download slowly. A limited amount of data can be uploaded and downloaded at any given time, and when the limit is reached, every device using the network experiences slow speeds. The only way around this problem is for other devices to stop using the network, or for the network to be upgraded to support more bandwidth.
- Along those same lines, another tip to download torrents faster is to download only one torrent at a time. When you run several torrent downloads simultaneously, each torrent effectively downloads more slowly than if they were running individually.Prioritizing torrents is one way to keep all your downloads running but keep one at the top of the list so that the client reserves enough computer power to download that one first. Most torrent programs support this feature.
- If the torrent you're downloading has too little a number of seeders, then there aren't enough sources from which to download the file. Look for the torrent elsewhere with more seeders, or wait for more users to upload the file so that you can download it.
- A computer that's slow overall, and therefore also slow at downloading torrents, might be infected with malware or might need some of its running programs shut down to free up system resources.