Quote Originally Posted by stanmc
I was watching the downloads on addresses near to mine, and many of us were getting really bad speeds.
I also see people getting bad speeds. But since I can't know their configuration I tend to think it is more likely that they are doing something strange than that BT is to blame (I admit that I could be wrong on this though).

As to setup, I currently use a cheap Dlink 514 router. There are actually a number of negatives with this router and I do not recommend it, but I am using it because it is easy to lock down the local IP addresses, which I want for my FTP server. As for BitTorrent, the only thing I have done with the router setup is add BitTorrent as a "Special application" and set the port range 6880-6899 as both the triger and public port range to forward to the local IP address that triggers the transfer. I can see how I would want a more complex setup if I was going to use BitTorrent from more than one computer at once, but I never do that. I do on occasion however use BitTorrent from a different system than my normal download/seeding system, so using a "Special application" rather than just forwarding the ports works well for me.

I tried ZoneAlarm when it first came out, but never did like it. I use either Tiny Personal Firewall (the old 2.15 version) or Kerio. The system I did my Knoppix DVD download on is running Kerio. They are on the 4.x versions, but that has too many features to suit me, I liked the clean and simple version 2.1.4 and stayed with it. I believe that Kerio may no longer be available for freee download on the web as McAffee bought them out. With Kerio or TPF I just clicked a box twice to tell the firewall to create a rule when I first started BitTorrent and don't think I did anything after that. Basically I have two rules that say BitTorrent can send and receive TCP traffic on any port to any IP address. I could combine them into one rule, but other than that there isn't much to change.

I have not run BT from Linux. The last time that I looked the Knoppix disc still had an old 3.x versionon it. So I've only used the Windows version. I've lookat at a few other BT knockoffs, but I like the standard official distribution. I do browse the web from another computer and do other light traffic things at the same time and see no impact there. About the only time I shut down BT is when I play interactive games (I.e. Quake), and that only because it BT affects ping time and causes lag. I do throttle back BT uploads to a slow speed when I download newsgroup headers (again on a different computer), putting it back when I start newsgroup downloads. Since both are competing for the same download bandwidth this does impact downloading speeds for both, but it works out and is a better choice for me than trying to be sure to increase the speed or restart BT after the news downloads finish. The 24 our DVD download on the first day that I mentioned did include a few hours of reduced speed because of newsgroup downloads. And of course I'm not running any folding@home software on the downloading computer (it's a 300 mhz system that I'm dedicating to BT downloading and seeding and the occasional test software). I really wonder if the folding software may not have impacted you, even though I expect it has zero bandwidth impact, if it was running on the same system.

I started a test download just a few minutes ago after I started typing this. It, of course, started slow, first zero then 1kbps. But it's now at 67kbps and still seems to be gaining speed (I typicall see a hugh speed increase overnight if any download runs that long). I'm not going to let this run that long and impact others who really are trying to download the file, but it seems to be confirming my expectation that a typical system should download faster than you reported.

Just looked again after proofing and before hitting send. Download rate at 95k and still climbing.