Azureus Torrent Download Speed Tips
If your torrents are downloading too slowly and you want to improve your download speed in Azureus, you’ve come to the right place. Azureus is a bittorrent client, namely, a program you can use to download files at high rates across the internet from a variety of peers. It’s a p2p (peer to peer) filesharing program, and may get you in trouble with legal authorities (RIAA, MPAA) if you use it illegally. However, it has plenty of non-infringing uses, as well.
Today I downloaded a torrent at 1.12 MB/s:
On a regular 10 Mb/s LAN that’s the best you’re going to be able to do, but only if your bit torrent program is configured properly. There are a few things you can do to improve performance in Azureus, and here they are:
1) Uncap the Windows XP SP2 Connections Limit
Service pack 2 limited the TCP/IP stack to 10 half-open connections–there rest are queued–to reduce virus spread rate. Unfortunately, this cripples a p2p program. Open those connections with this patch: EvID4226Patch223d-en.zip. Install at your own risk, but it works great for me with the limit increased from 10 to 100 or 200. You could go as high as 500 if you wanted, but that might be overkill.
2) Setup Port Forwarding
You need a path from your p2p program to the peers, and if you’re using a home firewall, make sure you forward the port that Azureus uses to your computer. This tutorial will help you–you can find the find the Azureus port in the first Options screen:
3) Setup Advanced Network Settings
Go to Options->Connection->Advanced Network Settings. You’ll see a screen like this:
You want a lot of simultaneous connections, so set the “max simultaneous outbound connection attempts” field to something just under what you set the Windows XP connection limit to in the hack in #1. I had 100 XP connections, so I set 64 in Azureus.
4) Upload Transfer
Go to Options->Transfer. You’ll see this screen:
You should set the “global max upload speed” 100-300KB/s, so that you can spend most of your connection bandwidth on downloading, and not uploading. However, the bit torrent protocol requires you to upload, so you should not set this less than 100 KB/s unless you’re on a very slow connection.
Additional Resources
2006 Torino Olympic Torrents
If you’re looking for a torrent to the 2006 winter olympics in Torino, demonoid has two up right now:
Torino 2006 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies
Download at 1.02 GB
and
Torino 2006 – Nordic Combined (Ski Jumping) part1 (day1) 11.02.2006
Download at 251.33 MB
If you know of any other torrent downloads for the winter olympics, leave a comment.
Update
Check out these three torrents for days 2, 3 of the the games:
They are titled, “2006 Turin Olympics Day 2 CBC Highlights Part XXX DIVX avi.”
Free High-res NASA Earth Images
NASA has released a huge number of high-resolution pictures of our planet earth at visibleearth.nasa.gov, which are, of course, free from copyright restriction of any kind, NASA being a government agency. Want a photo of our big blue marble planet? Check. Want to download infrared (IR) imagery of various parts of the earth? Check. Want to look at foliage, sea levels, or some other geological feature? Check.
They’re even using torrents (BT) to distribute high resolution photos of certain parts of the earth. Personally, I’ve never seen a 86400 x 43200 photo before, and one 1/4 of each dimension, or 1/16 smaller took 10 minutes to open in Photoshop with a gig and a half of RAM and a server scratch drive with a 16MB buffer. I’m glad they’re not using Apache to serve 2.9GB photos!
Very recently, NASA also put out this gorgeous picture of the southern lights, or aurora australis, as their IMAGE satellite circled the earth on September 11, 2005 after an unusually high burst of solar flare radiation:
The colored lights are the result of high-energy particles reacting with the earth’s magnetic shield.