On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Florin Andrei wrote:
On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 13:31 -0500, sean wrote:
The biggest problem is usually that your upstream speed is limited which
will severely reduce your download speed (1). One common cause is having
local firewall (iptables) rules active. Another is having a router
(linksys etc.) which hasn't been configured to allow bittorrent
connections (2).
I would venture to say that a combination of these factors is
responsible for most cases of poor performance, even more so that ISP
traffic shaping.
There's plenty of clueless people out there who are behind a broadband
router that's doing NAT, the router has no protocol helper for
BitTorrent and does not forward the BitTorrent ports to the correct
machine behind it - as a result of course the download speed is very
low, yet people complain about BitTorrent per se. lol :-)
Saying "BitTorrent sucks" has a pretty high probability of being
equivalent to "my computer/networking skills suck".
I have been using BitTorrent quite a bit and I have seen pretty iffy
performance downloading FC5.
I am using the correct ports, my firewall handles it fine, and my ISP does
not block. Other downloads have not been a problem since the last router
upgrade.
Something else is going on here.
2 http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm gives a pretty decent walk through
to help you configure your router properly
That document should be linked on the Fedora BitTorrent page at duke.edu
Also, if they are using a DLink hardware firewall/router, they need to
upgrade to the latest firmware revision. (And they will have to use XP to
do it. I could not get it to work otherwise.) The December 2005 update
fixes a bunch of problems with BitTorrent saturating the NAT.
--
"Remember there is a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." - Frank Zappa
