by Langston » Tue Nov 02, 2004 6:35 am
The download speed is dependent upon other peers. If you throttle back your upload, as Sarthis apparently did, what you wind up doing is hurting everyone - including yourself. The beauty of BitTorrent is that Blizzard isn't paying ANYTHING for download bandwidth except for the original seeding. Once seeded, the torrent server directs new clients to peers.
If you use a tool like BitStorm or BitTornado you can actually view who you are downloading from, who you are uploading to, and how fast each connection is. You will likely be uploading/downloading to/from multiple people at the same time. It's a very elegant design, however, the problem lies in people that close off their uploads (either reducing max transfer rate or cutting the number of allowed upload connections) as well as the govenors on the cable and DSL upload speeds (which are in place to prevent hosting from a consumer account).
If everyone wants to see better download speeds from BitTorrent, they need to turn their settings for uploads UP. I've found that if you're running cable, 40KB/S max throttle and 4-6 max connections is sustainable without affecting me. If you go lower, it forces other clients to use the same UNthrottled peers that YOU are trying to use thereby choking that peer and causing YOUR downloads to be slower. If you had your settings higher, you could be hosting sections of the download to those other clients and the bandwidth of the guy you need the next section from would be openned up.
So, for God's sake, stop throttling.... oh - and NEVER set yourself to SUPERSEED - unless you're running a Torrent server.
Last edited by
Langston on Tue Nov 02, 2004 7:20 am, edited 1 time in total.