Slow downloads

[Kroax]

Hello.

I decided to finally update BitComet the other day to version 0.77, but since then I've been having somewhat of trouble with my download speeds.

I have a 10Mbit connection both ways and the download speed is seldom above even 1, usually lying around 0. I've forwarded the ports on my Netgear WGR614 v6 correctly (I've checked and double checked numeral times) and the peers list show me that I can see remote peers.

And yes, this is true to all trackers/torrents (at least the 5-7 I've tried so far), so it's a local problem, most likely some setting.

The trackers and DHT network supplies me with many times over 1000 peers, but I usually don't connect to more than 3 at a time. And when I do, nothing much happens.

When I check the "statistics" tab for the torrent something interesting shows up though. It supplies me with all kinds of data, all of which seems to be correct, but where my WAN IP should be shown there is only a blank spot. My rather uneducated guess would be that the peers that I manage to connect to don't receive my WAN IP and in return doesn't know where to send the packages.

The problem is that I cannot for the life of me find a way to sort this out.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

[kluelos]

That's probably not an issue, since your router reassigns the apparent IP anyway, and BitComet doesn't need to know it for most purposes.

What is more likely is that your firewall is blocking BitComet from connecting. You know you upgraded, and I know you upgraded, but your firewall doesn't know from upgrades, thinks this is a whole new program that it doesn't have a rule for, and blocks it. Whenever you change versions of an internet application, delete and re-create your firewall rules for that application. See it that solves the problem, and re-check your settings to make sure something critical hasn't changed.

[Kroax]

I'm assuming you're talking about the Windows in.built firewall as well? Well, I've disabled that one and have no other software firewalls installed. But I did follow your advice and tell the router to forward another port and change it in BitComet, but unfortunately that didn't result in greater success as the problem remains.

[kluelos]

Your speed should generally be higher than that if BitComet isn't being blocked by something. It does, of course, depend on the torrent, since the biggest component by far is the composition of the swarm, and if its tiny, speed will be pitiful. Try downloading the Open Office torrent, since it's always well-seeded and serves as a good test of what your present setup can achieve. If it shows a very good speed, pretty much better than any you've ever seen, in the near neighborhood of 100 KB/s, your setup is probably OK. If it's still slow, you probably have something misconfigured.

One problem is that many people seem to have software firewalls that they don't know about, as a lot of security-suite software installs one without making that terribly obvious. BitComet without a listen port should generally do a lot better than what you're seeing with your listen port, and that usually means something's blocking it from communicating with the internet. Another problem is that the security programs themselves (some anti-virus programs, for example) interfere with P2P. You can generally resolve that by changing to other vendors that are known not to create those problems.

You should probably also try another bittorrent client, Azureus or µtorrent, and see if you get better performance from it. No client particularly outperforms any other, (if it did, we'd all be using that one), but getting the configuration right makes a huge difference.