Release TV

This tutorial will help you tune uTorrent client to obtain better speeds. uTorrent is the smallest torrent client that offers all the features that one may expect from such a software.

Basic tunning

Make sure your incoming connection port is forwarded! That is the most important thing to do when you seek better speeds.

limit the maximum upload rate
Options -> Preferences -> Connection – maximum upload rate

This is especially efficient on asymmetric links (when your donwload speed is much larger then the upload speed). You should limit the speed at 10kB/s for download speeds up to 2MB and 20kB/s for download speeds bigger then that. Please use the Alternate upload speed when not downloading option to be fair to the network. Also make sure you give back what you receive! You are basically configure your client to leach the network be sure to let it seed for a while after your download is finish.

* for any upload speeds smaller then 5 uTorrent will drop your download speed to 6 times the set upload speed. You will see a Download Limited message in the status bar.

Let uTorrent make more connections
Options -> Preferences -> BitTorrent

Your computer, if it’s not 100 years old, can handle many more connections then utorrent is set to use (most torrent clients limit this to 200-300 connections globally). You can safely put the global maximum number of connections to a value near 2000 and the maximum number of connected peers per torrent to 1000. With that many connections your computer will get a little bit of a performance hit but will improve the overall download speed. If you want to stay safe just double the default values.

The number of connections will help you download faster. You will feel this setting especially on torrents that don’t have many seeds but have many many peers (most new popular torrents are like that).

Add more trackers

Some of the sites give you an additional list of trackers, the list is just a bunch of trackers separated with newlines! - just copy it and right click on your torrent file and select Properties… past them and be sure that all of them have an empty line between them and then click ok. Add them to your torrent file to obtain better speeds.

Advanced tunning

The tweaks from above already make your torrent file faster, but if you really want to milk the absolute performance from your connection, add the tweaks below.

Limit local peer bandwidth
Options->Preferences->BitTorrent->Limit local peer bandwidth

disable UPnP if you use manual port forwarding
Options-> preferences -> Connection -> Enable UPnP - when using manual port forwarding always disable that.

Advenced options
Options -> preferences -> advanced

dht.rate – the default -1 value tells uTorrent to use your upload rate / 16 for dht. If you set your upload rate low, set this setting to something like 10000 (bytest/second). That will give enough bandwidth to the peer 2 peer tracking engine.

bt.connection_speed and net.max_halfopen

The first one tells uTorrent how many connections per second it can make until it reaches the net.max_halfopen. The default windows xp (with SP 2) installation is limited to a maximum of 10 connection attempts at any given time, so if you have an unpatched system and don’t care that while you’re downloading nothing works on your internet connection you can increase net.max_halfopen up to 10. If your system is patched to work with more then 10 connections or if you use windows vista just double or even triple the two settings.

peer.disconect_inactive and peer.disconect_inactive_interval

usually I let my torrent client with peer.disconect_inactive=true and with a peer.disconect_inactive_interval of 400 seconds (default is 300).