speed up bit torrnet downloads...

[spaced]

Help! Im going made. I have BT broadband with a Voyager 210 Router. My speed is approx 3.2mb per second. Howver, when I download the speed stays at like 20kb/s and I cant speed it up. Therefore something that usually takes 5 mins to download will take 5hrs!

Im using Utorrent and downloading from Mininova.

Please help!!

[vehelpfulguy]

You are NOT downloading from Mininova, the Mininova site (like all torrent sites) does not store ANY files to download.

What you are downloading from is other people's computers. You are downloading it from people who have already downloaded from OTHER people's computers (it is a bit like a chain letter).

You download it a piece at a time, one piece from one persons computer, another piece from anothers persons computer, and so on, and it is all re-assembled on your computer.

The speed you download is NOT dependant on your download speed but the UPLOAD speed of all these other computers.

Obviously the more people who have it on their computer the faster you are likely to get the file, so you need to look for seeders and leechers.

Seeders are people who have download ALL the file, leechers are people who are currently downloading it but have not got it all yet.

Both seeders and leechers can upload the file to you, so the more seeders and leechers a file has the quicker you will get it.

More...

[vehelpfulguy]

Usually when a file is first made available on a torrent site it has just one seeder (the person who put it there).

As other people start to download it they become leechers while they are downloading the file.

Gradually as the leechers get all the file they change from leechers to seeders.

So generally the more seeders the better.

Some things to look out for:

It is probably NOT a good idea to start downloding a file as soon as it is put there. Because there is only 1 seeder you can never be sure they will stay around long enough to allow others to get 100% of the file.

If a seeders PC is turned off then they cannot seed to anyone and it may be they turn their PC off before anyone gets 100% of the file and everyone is stuck on 80%.

So wait a few hours (or a day or so if it is a big file) till there are half a dozen seeders or more who all have 100% of the file.

THEN start your download. You have more chance of finding people with their PC switched on AND a fast upload speed.

While it is bad to start downloading too early, it is also bad to start downloading too late.

Once a file has been on a site for say a week, most of the people who want it will have downloaded it. The problem is that the seeders will have put it on CD or DVD, or moved to another folder on their hard drive.

So an old file may show it has 50 seeders, but in reality most of them do not have the file to seed so you will probably only find 1 or 2 people who will seed it to you.

It does take a while to get the hang of torrents and I have had a few files where I only ever got say 50% of the file before I gave up.

btw I use Azureus as my client and it is VERY easy to see who has 100% of the file and who has less than 100%, and you can also see the speed that each person is uploading it to you.

[Mattk]

surely most torrents are hosted by the sites themselves ? otherwise brand new files would start life as one seed with potentially tens of thousands of leechers.new highly sought after torrents eg such as tv captures start life with hundreds of seeds.

[vehelpfulguy]

As an example, piratebay says on its site:

"Only torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site".

I think it is true that ALL torrent sites only store the small torrent files and do not hold the actual DATA (film, MP3 files whatever) on their site.

[HWKE]

When an uploader decides to share a file, They usually flag it as an initial seeding which limits the number of leechers allowed to access it directly, so you may see a file with one seeder and lots of leechers but you never get to connect at all with the initial seeder. The initial seeder only releases one section at a time and waits for it to circulate before releasing the next etc.
This is done to speed the process up. I was going to explain how it works but Wikipedia has a very good explanation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-seeding