Cap your Upload Limit

Cap your upload Limit your upload speed to approximately 70% of your maximum upload rate.

First of all, test your connection speed. One good website for this is SpeedTest. Here is a screen shot of my connection.

Do note that SpeedTest list its results in kilobits. Since 8 bits = 1 Byte, simply divide the value by 8.

My connection is rated at:

8178 kilobits (download) and 248 kilobits (upload) or

1022.25 kiloBytes (download) and 31 kiloBytes (upload)

From here, change your maximum upload speed to 70% of your upload speed. For my connection, my upload speed should be ~20kB/s. But since I am on cable connection, I limit it further down to 10kB/s.

Do not get me wrong, everyone should share as much as possible. But if your upload rate reached is at its limit, your download rate suffers significantly.

But do not limit your download speed! The logic that by telling your BitTorrent client to reach its limited threshold is nonsense! Doing so only limits your potential download speed.

Also, if your upload is set to 15kB/s and your download is 50 times faster (in my case), do not expect your download to be maxed out every time! In fact, a realistic expectation for a well-seeded torrent (a swarm with many seeds and few peers) would still be around 80% your download speeds, i.e. 815kB/s for mine.

But for most of my torrents found in private websites (like BitSoup, FileList, TorrentBytes), my speed wwill be better than 815kBps. Here’s a screenshot.

Remember that this speed would be reached in an ideal, well-seeded torrent, but unfortunately, this is usually not the case with public trackers; where leechers far outnumber the few poor seeders trying, to keep the torrent going.

For such cases, I cannot help. This guide is only meant to optimize your BitTorrent client, not the BitTorrent protocol itself.