BitTorrent not slow, but users are clueless

alan alan at clueserver.org
Tue Mar 21 21:38:51 UTC 2006


On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Florin Andrei wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 13:31 -0500, sean wrote:
>
>> The biggest problem is usually that your upstream speed is limited which
>> will severely reduce your download speed (1).  One common cause is having
>> local firewall (iptables) rules active.  Another is having a router
>> (linksys etc.) which hasn't been configured to allow bittorrent
>> connections (2).
>
> I would venture to say that a combination of these factors is
> responsible for most cases of poor performance, even more so that ISP
> traffic shaping.
>
> There's plenty of clueless people out there who are behind a broadband
> router that's doing NAT, the router has no protocol helper for
> BitTorrent and does not forward the BitTorrent ports to the correct
> machine behind it - as a result of course the download speed is very
> low, yet people complain about BitTorrent per se. lol :-)
>
> Saying "BitTorrent sucks" has a pretty high probability of being
> equivalent to "my computer/networking skills suck".

I have been using BitTorrent quite a bit and I have seen pretty iffy 
performance downloading FC5.

I am using the correct ports, my firewall handles it fine, and my ISP does 
not block.  Other downloads have not been a problem since the last router 
upgrade.

Something else is going on here.

>> 2 http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm gives a pretty decent walk through
>>   to help you configure your router properly
>
> That document should be linked on the Fedora BitTorrent page at duke.edu

Also, if they are using a DLink hardware firewall/router, they need to 
upgrade to the latest firmware revision.  (And they will have to use XP to 
do it.  I could not get it to work otherwise.)  The December 2005 update 
fixes a bunch of problems with BitTorrent saturating the NAT.

-- 
"Remember there is a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." - Frank Zappa




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