If you say the word “torrent” to many computer users, the immediate association is “pirating”. And it’s true that torrenting has gotten a very bad reputation in the public mind, with the assumption being that downloading any torrent is illegal. While there are a lot of pirate sites out there using torrenting to illegally distribute content, torrenting as a technology is a perfectly legitimate way to share large files online, and there are many torrents out there that are totally legal to use. People shared large files using the BitTorrent protocol for years, long before software piracy became the big thing it is today. A lot of large software distributions (like Linux OS packages) use torrents to get the software to end users.

If more people have the file or parts of the file, you have more opportunity to download it. If those seeders or peers have a good connection, you get the file faster. UTorrent displays the number of seeders and peers, so it’s usually a good idea to select the torrents with a higher number of seeders to get that file faster. Dec 8, 2018 - Torrenting has gotten a very bad reputation in the public mind, with the assumption being that downloading any torrent is a case of piracy.

It is therefore important to realize that using BitTorrent or uTorrent (or any other torrenting client) is not illegal in and of itself. Using them will not, in and of itself, get you thrown in jail, banned by your ISP, or copyright trolled. However, if you use the protocol to share copyrighted media (and if you have bad luck or are careless), those things might happen. With that out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff. In this article I will give you a brief tutorial on how to make uTorrent faster. The examples I give all use uTorrent, but if you use a different client, most of these procedures will still work, you’ll just have to find the equivalent settings in your client.

Speeding up torrent downloads with uTorrent

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Speeding up torrent downloads with uTorrent
Streamline queueing

uTorrent is a torrenting client that works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. uTorrent is free, though there are premium versions available for Windows that add some bells and whistles; the free versions are perfectly adequate for anyone who just wants to share some files. uTorrent isn’t the only torrent tracker out there but it is one of the most popular. It has been around for years and is the torrent client of choice for millions of people across the world. However, it isn’t well-optimized “out of the box”, and there are some things you can to do make it faster.

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Let it through your firewall

The first thing you should do when installing uTorrent is to click yes when it asks you if you want to ‘Add an exception for uTorrent in Windows Firewall’. If you hit no or don’t use Windows Firewall, you still need to let uTorrent through.

If using Windows Firewall:

Open uTorrent and select Preferences.
Navigate to Connections and check the box next to ‘Add Windows Firewall exception’.
Open your firewall software and allow uTorrent traffic to pass freely through.

Do not be tempted to turn off your firewall when torrenting, as this opens your computer up to malware and all sorts of threats. If you use a router with firewall, you will need to configure this too.

Add more or faster seeders and peers

Torrenting works by distributing a file across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of seeders and peers. Seeders are computers that have the complete file available for upload. Peers are computers that are still in the process of downloading the file. When a new peer joins the system and is looking for a file, the torrenting software breaks the file into many tiny chunks. The software then looks for peers that have already obtained the chunks that the new peer still needs, and if they have it, the other peers upload it to the new peer. If none of the peers have the chunk, then the system goes and gets it from one of the seeds (which have all the chunks).

This system keeps the seeds from being overwhelmed by requests, and once the peers collectively have all of the chunks of the file, then new peers joining can get the file very quickly because it is available from many different sources instead of just a few seeds. For this reason, the more seeds and the more peers a torrent already has, the quicker any new members of the network will be able to download the file. When a peer finishes downloading the entire file, it becomes another seed and can further enhance the download speed.

Torrent websites don’t actually keep the original file themselves. Instead, they have trackers, a file that describes all the chunks of the original file. The tracker also keeps track of how many seeds and peers are working with the specified file (which always starts with one seed, the original file owner). So when you go to a torrent website, it will show you how many seeds and how many peers are already working with the file. It’s almost always a good idea to select the torrent with the highest number of seeders and peers to get that file faster. Higher numbers also are a good general indicator that a particular torrent has high-quality content – people are voting with their feet.)

Allocate the correct bandwidth

While it might seem counterintuitive, allocating too much bandwidth to torrents can slow them down. You need to get the ratio right if you are to get the most throughput.

Open uTorrent and select Options.
Navigate to Preferences and Connection.
Check the box next to ‘Apply rate limit to transport overhead’.
Change Maximum Number of Global Connections to 2329.
Change Maximum Number of Peers Connected to 257.
Change Number of Upload Slots Per torrent to 14.
Change Maximum upload rate to 14.

Change the port

Port allocation for uTorrent defaults to somewhere between 6881 and 6999. Most people know this, and most ISPs know it too. Accordingly, many ISPs throttle these ports so that torrenting traffic won’t burden their network. If your ISP throttles these ports, it makes sense to change them. The recommendation is to change the port to something over 10000 to avoid both throttling and conflicts within your computer.

Open uTorrent and select Options.
Navigate to Preferences and Connection.
Change the port to a number between 10000 and 12000.

Streamline queueing

Queueing sets up several torrents to download one after the other. Setting this up correctly enables you to maximize throughput. It’s a small but very effective tweak. While your computer or phone is waiting for packets from one torrent, it can send out requests for packets from another.

Open uTorrent and select Options.
Navigate to Preferences and Queueing.
Set Maximum Number of Active Torrents to 10.
Set Maximum Number of Active Downloads to 10.
Set Seeding Global Minimum Ratio to 0.

Prioritize a torrent

My final tips for speeding up uTorrent is to prioritize the download you want first. This gives that file first choice of bandwidth and resources so will download faste

How Download Torrent File Faster