[ale] bittorrent

[William Bagwell]

On Saturday 06 March 2004 03:26 pm, Me, Myself & I mumbled:

> Sorry I don't remember which site I saw this on.

Ah, this one <http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/>

"Sometimes, limiting your upload rate will increase your download rate. 
This is especially true for asymmetric connections such as cable and 
ADSL, where the outbound bandwidth is much smaller than the inbound 
bandwidth. If you are seeing very high upload rates and low download 
rates, this is probably the case. The reason this happens is due to the 
nature of TCP/IP -- every packet received must be acknowledged with a 
small outbound packet. If the outbound link is saturated with BitTorrent 
data, the latency of these TCP/IP ACKs will rise, causing poor 
efficiency.

 Use a client that allows limiting of the upload rate, and set it to 
around 80% of the maximum rate observed. It can be tempting to limit the 
rate to very small values. On very healthy torrents, this will not 
adversely affect the download rate. However, when there are fewer peers 
you will generally get higher download rates by allowing the highest 
upload rate possible before saturating the link -- the (approx.) 80% 
sweet spot."

BTW are you using the official client, or one of the variants?
-- 
William