Increase Download Speed of a BitTorrent Client

Download torrents faster by tweaking the program settings

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.

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

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.