slow Bittorrent speeds when connected to a router

[rocketsummer]

I just got a new iBook last week. i'm loving it except for one thing.. I'm connected to the Internet through a Netgear MR814 router (sharing the DSL connection with a WinXP machine) and whenever i download files from Bittorrent, the speeds are very slooooow (3 kb/s max). non-Bittorrent downloads are normal, it's BT that's the problem. anyone have any advice how to solve this? i've tried port forwarding, different BT clients, everything i can think of, and i've just about given up.

help, please

[marvinp]

Are you sure it's the router? Have you tried connecting your iBook directly to the router via ethernet? How about directly to the DSL connection? Are BT downloads also slow on the PC?

[Kenneth]

Only two possibilities I can think of:

1.) Port forwarding. Just to make sure you've done it right, set ports 6880 to 6999 to forward to your iBook's IP address

2.) You have a firewall running on your iBook which is blocking your Bit Torrent connections and not allowing you to increase your rating/find more seeds, thus the slow download. Again set ports 6880-6999 to allow incoming/outgoing, or shut the firewall down and see if it works.

Which ISP are you using btw?

[rocketsummer]

pretty sure it's the router.. i do currently connect the router via ethernet because i still don't have an APE card installed so i can't surf wirelessly. when i connect directly to the DSL modem, the speeds are really faster.

when the PC's also connected to the router, the speeds are considerably slower (reaches 40kb/s, the normal speed is around 60-70) than usual but not as slow as my iBook. sometimes my iBook gets as slow as 15 b/s.

i thought the problem might be the torrent itself but i tried another torrent (made sure there were a lot of seeds) and it was still slow.

[rocketsummer]

Originally posted by Kenneth
Only two possibilities I can think of:

1.) Port forwarding. Just to make sure you've done it right, set ports 6880 to 6999 to forward to your iBook's IP address

2.) You have a firewall running on your iBook which is blocking your Bit Torrent connections and not allowing you to increase your rating/find more seeds, thus the slow download. Again set ports 6880-6999 to allow incoming/outgoing, or shut the firewall down and see if it works.

Which ISP are you using btw?

PLDT myDSL.

i shut the firewall down and the speeds increased. i'm now getting up to 11kb/s but that's still nowhere near the normal speed. what i don't understand is the night i got my iBook i was reaching speeds of 80kb/s on Bittorrent. then it just suddenly slowed down.

[Kenneth]

Wait a bit. The speed will gradually increase the more/longer you upload. Maybe the seeds for that particular file are a lot fewer now? Try other torrent file from other sites.

[wgx428]

Just follow-up, how do I set-up bit torrent to speed up the download? I'm currently using BitTorrent OS X version 3.4.2. My connections set-up is:

iMac airport extreme --> linksys router (with speedboaster) --> myDSL modem

I have been looking the menu of BitTorrent and cannot find anyway to change the download/upload set-up. The only thing available on the preferences option is the low port (6881) and high port (6889). So far, I have not seen the download go more than 5KiB/s while the uploads are usually at a higher rate (10KiB/s). The total upload/download ratio is also at 2 or 3 (upload 2 or 3 times the download). Is there a better client to use or how do I set-up the client, airport, router to speed-up the download? Thanks.

[coffeelover]

I'm not sure if the reference BitTorrent client you're running supports uPNP, you might want to try Azureus, it supports uPNP so you might not have to configure port forwarding.