Bit Torrents (not illegal)

[The Ratt]

Well I've had a bit torrent client on my computer for a while, but I never use it. I recently tried to download a game demo from Feral, who only offers their game demos via bit torrent, but I am having questionable success. The file is 2gb, which I know is very large (thanks Feral for not compressing it then[i/] sending it out), but I am getting a very crappy download rate between 4k/B per second and 15k/B per second which translates to 1-110 days before the download is complete.

 

How do you get it to download faster?

[A less presumptuous name.]

Try looking for other downloads of the game. The more peers and seeds and whatever, the more people out there from whom you can download. Most torrent sites have statistics on each file, so look for one with lots of peers and seeds and few leaches.

[Alorael at Large]

Having your BitTorrent configuration not quite right, especially bad port forwarding and firewalling, can also slow your downloads to a crawl. If the number of seeds is substantial, the number of leechers isn't larger than the number of seeds, and you're getting terrible speeds, you may need to reconfigure.

 

—Alorael, who isn't enough of a BitTorrent user to be able to help much with those configurations.

[The Ratt]

Can anyone help with those configurations? Are they through a browser or the torrent client?

[A less presumptuous name.]

Probably the client. Try finding the preferences. I don't really know what to mess with, but I would guess you can cap upload and download rates at the very least, so that most of your time is spent downloading from others, not uploading to others.

[Alorael at Large]

Let's try to work through this. What is the seeder/leecher ratio on the torrent you're using, what client are you using, and do you get any messages about NAT/Firewall problems?

 

—Alorael, who will also go ahead and ask how much control you have over your internet access. Having a router that obeys your every whim is very different from working with someone else's network.

[The Ratt]

I'm using Azureus, it says there are 15 seeds and 18 peers, which I think are the same as leechers. I don't have very much control over my wireless network, but there are no firewall warnings or anything. I think it may come down to the fact that I just have crappy internet and there are too many people on it at once.

 

My rate is over 100 KB/s now (which still translates to over 3 hours) that my family has gone to bed. I feel that my mother's computer hogs bandwidth.

[Lilith]

If your network is wireless, I assume you're behind a router, right? Is it set to forward port 59974 (or whichever port you're using for BitTorrent) to your IP address? If it's not, you will never get download speeds that aren't terrible, and you may cause your router to crash.

[Alorael at Large]

If your router is configured for UPnP, you could switch that on in Azureus to get around a number of configuration issues.

 

—Alorael, who thinks it's at least worth trying UPnP. He'll also say that 100 kbps is not bad for BitTorrent speed. Three hours isn't unbearable. Think back to 28.8k days and be happy.

[Lilith]

Actually, 100 kbps is pretty bad, but it sounded like he was talking about 100 kBps, which is decent enough and probably means there's nothing drastically wrong with his configuration.

[Celtic Minstrel]

For the record, the peer count would include the seed count. So, 15 seeds and 18 peers implies 3 leechers.

 

 

(I think.)

[JadeWolf]

I get max 60kbps.

[The Ratt]

I think Thuryl is right, there is nothing wrong with my settings, I just think there is either too much or too slow traffic on the network.

 

At the time in question there was my computer (1st gen Aluminum iMac), my mom's iMac G5 (with web browser, email, and several other potentially internet using programs open all day), my brother's iMac G3 (which has 256 MB of ram but uses about 200 just running), an iPhone, and at least one iPod touch, maybe two.

 

Which do you think it is?

 

Edit: 900th Post.

[A less presumptuous name.]

That's probably it. My internet starts to complain whenever my brother comes home from college, and we only have a desktop, my laptop, occasionally my dad's, his (which has tons of downloads...), and maybe his ipod. Not that much, and the new router helps. The minimum high-speed internet is not very fast.

 

And congrats.

 

EDIT: 689th post

[Callie]

Originally Posted By: Master1

EDIT: 689th post

What's so special about 689?

[A less presumptuous name.]

Absolutely nothing. I just felt like sharing

[VCH]

I was unaware that bitorrent clients could be used for anything but piracy, cool.

[Alorael at Large]

They're actually quite useful for distributing large files without a server that can serve the files well. That helps companies keep down costs, but it also helps random people provide music, games, or whatever else they feel like providing to anyone and everyone.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think anything entirely unusable for legal purposes could so happily spread with no concerted opposition. Even Gnutella has defended its legal uses.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: VCH

I was unaware that bitorrent clients could be used for anything but piracy, cool.

Bittorrents. Nowhere will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

[JadeWolf]

Many software companies distribute betas and such by torrent.

Don't accuse torrents of being evil, etc. It's just another way to download, and because it is considerably easier, has become infamous for the way most use it.

I'm sure Mister Bit (whatever) didn't have illegality in ùmind when he made his Torrent in the first place.

[The Mystic]

Regardless of BitTorrent's intended use, I have yet to find anything legal to download with it, nor have I seen anything that was even remotely virus-free.

[A less presumptuous name.]

The entire purpose of this thread was to help someone download a legal torrent. Also, I've done a few torrents and, on a mac, I've never gotten any viruses.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

Regardless of BitTorrent's intended use, I have yet to find anything legal to download with it, nor have I seen anything that was even remotely virus-free.

Blizzard uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute updates to its games (so that its servers aren't clogged by everyone downloading the update from them at once), and it's not the only company to do so.

[Sudanna]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

nor have I seen anything that was even remotely virus-free.

How often have you looked? Because Nalyd has never had a problem with viruses.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Thuryl

Blizzard uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute updates to its games (so that its servers aren't clogged by everyone downloading the update from them at once), and it's not the only company to do so.

Is that how the auto-updates work? I've only ever played Diablo 2, so my experience is limited. Regardless of how Blizzard does it, it works well.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: ☭

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

nor have I seen anything that was even remotely virus-free.

How often have you looked? Because Nalyd has never had a problem with viruses.

I've stopped looking, actually; the last time was probably around June or July. When I did look, it was on a semi-regular basis at most, and always ended up in some rather unfriendly corners of the internet.

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: JadeWolf

I'm sure Mister Bit (whatever) didn't have illegality in ùmind when he made his Torrent in the first place.

His name is Bram Cohen. So now you know.

Other than the quality of the torrent (they tend to get stale over time when people stop seeding), your transfer rate can be impacted mostly by two factors.

a.) NAT. If you're not sure whether you use NAT, you can run "ipconfig /all" in Windows or "ifconfig eth0" in Linux to find your local IP address. If it differs from what you see eg. on this page, particularly if it starts with "192.168" or "172" or "10", you are. In that case you do need to forward the port to get the full performance, as has been said.

b.) Your ISP is throttling you. Many ISPs in the States do it, particularly the more crooked ones. Azureus provides an international list of bad providers known to interfere with the protocol.

[The Ratt]

P.S.

 

I'm on a mac,

I'm on a mac,

Everybody look at me cause I'm working on a mac

I'm on a mac,

I'm on a mac,

Take a good hard look at the ************* mac.

 

So is there some way to check if I use NAT on a mac?

 

P.P.S. I don't think I have one of those limiting ISPs.

[Niemand]

From what Aran says, it appears that you just need to check your computer's assigned IP address. Look in the Network Preferences pane or the Network section of the System Profiler.

 

EDIT: And then check, as Aran described, how your computer's address appears from outside.

[The Ratt]

Okay, I have some questions. Will switching to that forward port speed up all of my internet functions? Also does anyone know how to switch ports on a mac? I can't find it. I've looked in system preferences, and I'm looking in Network Utility right now. Should I search my router for open ports?

[Niemand]

Quote:

Will switching to that forward port speed up all of my internet functions?

No, it will affect only communications via that particular port, which will be a different one than those used for other purposes.

Quote:

Also does anyone know how to switch ports on a mac? I can't find it. I've looked in system preferences, and I'm looking in Network Utility right now. Should I search my router for open ports?

To the last bit: no. To the first bit: as I understand it this is usually handled by the client program; at least it was by the only one I've used, and I really don't know much about the details. As I understand it, the process involves asking the your router you specifically forward a certain category of packets (those destined for he appropriate port.

[Celtic Minstrel]

That last sentence doesn't actually make sense, Niemand.

 

Originally Posted By: Arancaytrus

b.) Your ISP is throttling you. Many ISPs in the States do it, particularly the more crooked ones. Azureus provides an international list of bad providers known to interfere with the protocol.

Ooh, perhaps that's part of the reason BitTorrent was always so slow. Yet another reason to move away from Rogers.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Arancaytrus

international list of bad providers

Another reason to hate Comcast with a passion!

[Niemand]

Corrected version of my last sentence (not sure how it got chopped off):

 

As I understand it, the process involves asking the your router you specifically forward a certain category of packets (those destined for the appropriate port) to your computer specifically, so that it's easy for other peers to send data directly to you.

[A less presumptuous name.]

The phrase: "asking the your router" is still strange. Is "your router" a specific program or something?

[Niemand]

No, it's a piece of network hardware .There's almost certainly one between your computer and the internet in general, although it might not be your property.

 

Corrected sentence, version 3:

As I understand it, the process involves asking your router to specifically forward a certain category of packets (those destined for the appropriate port) to your computer specifically, so that it's easy for other peers to send data directly to you.

[Dikiyoba]

You obviously shouldn't have mocked Arancaytar, Niemand. He's hacking your posts.

 

Dikiyoba.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Yeah, I thought you meant what you're third sentence says. It's been a while since I've lived in Wisconsin, so I apparently don't know the latest colloquialisms. Do the college students still call Beloit "Bell-wah?"

[Niemand]

@Diki: He's moved on to fancier techniques, remember? He's making me write the posts wrong in the first place.

 

@Master1: Accidental inclusion of extra definite articles would be a curious colloquialism[^1], but no, it merely stems from my inability to type. I grew up in Missouri (and I came from one of the civilized portions, where people do know to use an 'e' sound at the end of the state's name, even though they insist on absolutely butchering german and french place/street names); I've only been in Wisconsin for fifteen and a half months.

 

[^1]: It would be like anti-russian style english.[^2]

[^2]: I really like writing footnotes. I've discovered that I can't restrain myself here, so even though these posts aren't Markdown, I'm starting to write PHP Markdown Extra style footnotes. I think I like footnotes even better than parenthetical statements; they allow me to ramble on for much longer.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Haha, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.[^1] By the way, welcome to Wisconsin.

 

 

[^1]: You're right, this is fun.