Why Did My BitTorrent Download Speeds Drop After Changing My Internet Plan?

[TSN79]

I recently had 6 Mbit line (down) and 1 Mbit up. I never experienced that all of my download capacity was utilized, seldom as much as half even. So I changed my line to 3 (down) and 0.5 (up) Mbit instead. This had an unexpected effect in that my download speed was cut pretty much in half. I don't see how this should happen since my bandwidth should still be large enough to cope with the speeds to which I'm accustomed. Any ideas on why this is happening?

 

[ukmicky]

I have a 16 meg connection but very rarely achieve 3 meg download speeds with bit torrent but can easily exceed 10 megs when downloading from other sources.

With bit torrent i believe you have to give to receive but at the same time you have to restrict how much bandwidth you are prepared to give to those uploading from you as you require a certain amount of upload speed for yourself as data needs to be sent backwards and forwards to be checked for errors . In other words give to much and you slow down your downloads. I generally allow half of my upload speed to used for uploads to others .

obviously bit torrent should not be used to download copyrighted material

 

[TSN79]

Dude, that totally worked! Thx!

 

[ukmicky]

No problem

 

[BoredNL]

Another problem with torrent downloads is that all of the open connections will eat up CPU time. If you use another program that is intensive on your CPU in addition to the torrent downloader and you end up eating all of your CPU bandwidth up, your downloads will slow. If you have a multi-core computer and are running into this problem, you can increase the priority of the bittorrent downloader to achieve faster speeds without too much interference with whatever else you want to do. (I wouldn't recommend this on a single processor computer though as it will slow your system to a crawl)