Hacksar

If you’ve just started using BitTorrent (perhaps thanks to our guide), you may not be fond of the whole “allow people to upload while you download” thing. It kills your bandwidth, and can make using the internet at all difficult, especially if you don’t have a powerful internet connection. It can also pose a great problem if your internet has upload/download limits, and you don’t want to just keep seeding after you finish your download, and thus use up your upload limit rather quickly. (Most places, such as colleges, that use upload/download limits set the upload limit to be much lower than the download limit, so you really need to watch out for that when torrenting).

Here, you’ll learn about how to tweak your settings in uTorrent (our favorite torrent client) to minimize your upload amount and still get the best download speeds you can. Keep reading for the guide.

1. The easiest way to do this would be to use the built in uTorrent tools Speed Guide Wizard. Open up uTorrent, and go to Options -> Speed Guide. It will then bring up the wizard.
2. The first thing you want to do is find out what speed your internet connection gets. Click the big button that says “Run Speed Test” in the Speed Guide. It will open up this page.
3. Select whichever version that applies to you. If you are unsure of which to use, select the Flash 8 one (first choice). If you know that you have Fios (fiber optics, such as Verizon), select the Java based one.
4. At the next window, you will be given a choice of different servers found in different cities throughout America. Choose the city that is closest to you and continue. The test should then start automatically.
5. Allow the test to complete (it will come up with both a download and upload number, MOST of the time the download will be higher than the upload number).
6. The number of interest is the download value. It will be given in Kb/s, so if the number that is given is over 1,000, divide it by 1,000 and consider it to be Mb/s from now on. As you can see in the image, my download speed was 2,310 Kb/s, and that becomes 2.31 Mb/s.
7. Back in the Speed Guide Wizard, the dropdown for Connection Type will have many different values. Provided that you don’t have dial-up (most likely not if you’re torrenting things), select the choice that is closest to your download value. For example, since my download speed was 2.31 Mb/s, I selected the “xx/2Mbit” choice because 2Mb is closest to 2.31 Mb/s. You preferably want to round down because it’s better to give less bandwidth to the torrents than to give it too much and tax your whole internet connection.
8. Once you select that Connection Type, it will automatically change certain settings to the optimal values.
9. Then, make sure you have your port properly forwarded. The Speed Guide has a handy button that can test to see if your port is forwarded correctly or not. (For further information about how to forward ports on your router, visit PortForward.com.)
10. Hit “Use Selected Settings” to save your settings. That just makes your torrents go at the optimal speed possible with your internet connection. Now, the following steps will show you how to become a sneaky leech.
11. In uTorrent, go to Options -> Preferences. The following steps illustrate what the settings should be in each tab. The three underlined settings are the most important to reduce total upload amounts.
12. Connection -> Add Windows Firewall Exception: True
13. Bandwidth -> Max Upload Rate: (some numerical value other than 0, generated by Speed Guide – I have 186 kB/s)
14. Bandwidth -> Max Download Rate: 0 kB/s (unlimited, you don’t want to hinder downloads, but to make them go as fast as possible)
15. Bandwidth -> Number of Upload Slots per Torrent: 8 (again, generated by Speed Guide)
16. Queueing -> Seed While Ratio s: 0% or seeding time is: <= 0 min
17. Queueing -> Seeding tasks have higher priority than downloading tasks: false (unchecked)
18. Queueing -> When uTorrent reaches the Seeding Goal: Limit the upload rate to: 0 kB/s

Since your internet connection’s upload speed is usually the limiting factor when torrenting, by taking these few simple steps, you can increase your torrenting efficiency a lot. The upload rate limit will prevent the torrent from hogging too much instantaneous upload bandwidth, and the last three underlined settings force the torrents to stop seeding, saving your total upload amount (incase you have upload limits or don’t want constant internet activity). This is useful not only for internet services with caps on upload/downloads, but also for if you leave a download going overnight and don’t want to waste bandwidth uploading after it finishes.

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