Optimal uTorrent settings

[allen1013]

Am using uTorrent 3.4.4 what if any would be the best settings to have for good download and upload connection and speed.

[Joker__TPB]

I don't even mess around with the settings, but hey, check out some of these tips.




"Enable UPnP port mapping. This will allow uTorrent to bypass your firewall and connect directly to the seeders. This will ensure that you are getting the best possible transfer rate for your file.



Configure the "BitTorrent" settings in the Preferences menu. In the left panel, select the "BitTorrent" option. In this menu, check every check-box except for "Limit local peer bandwidth." For the option reading "Outgoing Protocol Encryption," select "Enabled."

 

[Moe]

There is no one set of optimal settings.

If there were, there wouldn't need to be settings in the first place.


The most important thing to do ensure best performance is to make sure you can accept incoming connections.  This means making sure no firewall is blocking incoming connections on your set TCP and UDP ports.  If you are behind a router, make sure it is set to forward those ports.

The rest is dependent on your available bandwidth and how much of that bandwidth you want to commit to running torrents.

If you want your bandwidth to be usable for anything else, then you will need to cap the amount that your torrent client can use.  After that, make sure your maximum number of connections, upload slots, and number of running torrents is reasonable for whatever bandwidth you make available.

Most torrent clients can auto configure that stuff themselves.  That is generally a good starting point.

[allen1013]

Thanks guys

[᠎]

"Enable UPnP port mapping. This will allow uTorrent to bypass your firewall and connect directly to the seeders. This will ensure that you are getting the best possible transfer rate for your file.

No it won't. That setting has nothing to do with your firewall, nothing to do with connecting directly to anyone (you never connect directly with anyone), nothing to do with seeders, and nothing to do with transfer rates.

It simply tells uTorrent to try using the UPnP protocol to instruct your router to forward a port automatically. That is all.

If you are using a VPN or not using a router (or your router doesn't support UPnP or you have forwarded a port manually) it achieves nothing at all.

If you are using a router and not using a VPN and a port is not forwarded, the only thing which will be reduced will be the size of the set of peers you can potentially share pieces with. You won't be able to send/receive pieces to/from the relatively small subset of other peers who are also using routers (and not using VPNs) without a port forwarded. Transfer rates from individual peers will never be affected and overall transfer rates from all peers combined will only be affected occasionally, and rarely noticeably.

Configure the "BitTorrent" settings in the Preferences menu. In the left panel, select the "BitTorrent" option. In this menu, check every check-box except for "Limit local peer bandwidth." For the option reading "Outgoing Protocol Encryption," select "Enabled."

Enabling Outgoing Protocol Encryption is appropriate (but it has been obsolete for many years and won't really make any difference).

Disabling bandwidth management [uTP] will increase transfer speeds if your network is congested (at the expense of other bandwidth users, such as your siblings making Skype calls or playing online games etc.)  It is a setting which tells uTorrent to automatically throttle it's own bandwidth usage when it detects increases in latency.



In general terms, with modern broadband connections, most clients perform perfectly well 'out-of-the-box' ie. with their default settings.  Running the setup wizard, which most clients and all good clients have will help but probably won't make a noticeable difference tbh.

The two very best things you can do to maximise your speeds are are:

1. don't have many torrents seeding and/or downloading at once. Think about it--your ISP only supplies you with the amount of bandwidth you're paying for. That is then divided between all of the torrents you have running (and anything else you or other members of your household are using bandwidth for). If you have one torrent running, it's going to go pretty much flat tack.  If you have 51 torrents running, they're all going to crawl.

2. pay attention to the swarms when choosing which torrents to download. A torrent with 1 seed and 1 peer is not going to download as quickly as one with 100 seeds and 100 peers, because there aren't as many people to download from. A torrent with 1 seed and 500 peers will start really fast (as some of the pieces will be available from many of the peers) but it will slow to a crawl before it completes (as some of the pieces will only be available from the single seed and all the peers will be requesting those pieces); of course if you leave such torrents to mature for a few hours or a day, they will fly when you come to download them and they're flush with seeds.

[Incidentally, the other big advantage of not downloading torrents the day they appear is that it dramatically reduces your chances of ending up with a dud--moderators and early downloaders who get stung and report bad torrents will manage to delete most fake and infected torrents with 24 hours; and it isn't rare for uploaders to realise mistakes have been made and to uploaded fixed or 'PROPER' torrents within a day of their first efforts.]

You should also remember that the swarm statistics on torrent sites in general and TPB in particular are not at all reliable. Just because it says there is only 1 seed doesn't mean there aren't really 234 of them (and vice versa). Use some common sense--a recent YIFY torrent will almost certainly be well seeded regardless of what the torrent download page might say.  And a 21GB game just released in stores this afternoon, uploaded by an uploader who has never uploaded any other torrents, won't have 2345 seeds no matter what it looks like.  Whenever you're unsure, you can just start the torrent and give your client 2-3 minutes to get up to speed--it will then report how many seeds their really are and you can choose to stop it or let it run based on that much more accurate information.