Saturday, May 15, 2010

Quick tip on Bit Torrent speeds

I don't know if this works elsewhere, and it may be a quirk of my particular set of hardware and settings, but here's something to consider, anyway. In KL, Streamyx bandwidth for BT usually takes about 4 hours to get up to full speed (and full speed on a 4Mb line is ~300-350 kBps, which is all right). If you take off any limiters, some popular torrents (with like ~1000 seeds) can get you that speed almost immediately.

But if you're on torrents that have <150 seeds, which is still not too shabby, and you want that speed quicker than 5 hours, then here's a possibility - download something from Microsoft after you've started your torrents. It doesn't have to be big, and to be honest it doesn't have to be from Microsoft - any fast HTTP site (like anything served by Akamai, for instance) will do. For preference, virus definitions, which change daily, so it's always going to be fresh.

I can't explain why; probably just a quirk of ADSL.

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