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uTorrent Download Speed Increased to 135% Just by Changing Settings

Downloading via torrents can be the fastest way to download files on the Internet, provided that the program settings used to make these transfers are appropriate to your connection. However, not always a low downloading speed happens due to wrong settings, you also need to choose torrents wisely.

In this article, you will find some tips to increase uTorrent download speed which is most popular Torrent client.

Set Upload Speed to Optimum

The default configuration of uTorrent does not establish limits to the speed of uploading files, which can compromise the throughput of downloads. The more “clever” ones will leave this value to least, but this causes the program to identify you as a peer bad, lowering its priority in time to receive files from other people. To avoid this, just leave a median value.

uTorrent Upload Speed Limit

In Options > Setup Guide, click the down arrow next to “Your upload speed” and choose an amount equivalent to 80% of the maximum upload speed of your connection (use SpeedTest to find it). Click “Save & Close” to exit.
Make Sure you Set the Results in Kbit instead pf Mbit.

Change Maximum Number of Peers and Connections

Now it’s time to change the program preferences. Go to Options > Preferences > Bandwidth control : at the bottom of the window, change the maximum number of connections to “450” ??and the maximum number of peers per torrent connect it to “200”.

Number of Connections in uTorrent

Enable Protocol Encryption

In the menu “BitTorrent”, find the field “Protocol Encryption” and change the output value to “Enabled”.

protocol encryption in utorrent

Some Advanced Tweaks

In the advanced settings of uTorrent, change the values of following parameters to “80”

  1. bt.auto_dl_sample_average
  2. bt.auto_dl_sample_window
  3. bt.ban_threshold
  4. bt.connect_speed
  5. net.max_halfopen.
  6. rss.update_interval

advanced utorrent tweaks

Add Windows Firewall Exception

Generally, it is done while installing itself but in case you forgot to add exception, you can go to Preferences > Connection, check the “Add Windows Firewall Exception” to avoid problems like the program is unable to perform downloads.

add firewall exception utorrent

Force Start Torrent

When a download is in progress, right-click on it, select “Force Start” (only in torrents to various sources) and Bandwidth Allocation > High.

Force Start Torrent

In these settings, it is always interesting to watch the number of seeds (people sharing) and Leechers (people downloading) a torrent. When the number of people wanting to download is larger than just those who are distributing a file, the download speed tends to be very low.

The same happens when the torrent is very new, because there are few people who have the entire file to share.

So when doing a search on torrent sites, always arrange the results by number of seeders : the larger it is, the better your chances of getting higher download speed.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 13 comments
srinu smart - May 10, 2012

Already tried dude, but max upto few kb/s. It depends upon our net connection speed. Any thanks for sharing. This topic helps for new beeies.

Reply
    Rohit Langde - May 14, 2012

    Yes, ultimately it depends on your ISP bandwidth; Though it doesn’t matter if settings aren’t accurate but they shouldn’t be configured incorrectly which will result in low speed inspite of connection capacity.
    And that’s the reason, I listed them out in one article.

    Reply
Sagas - May 11, 2012

only the last tip helps in increasing speed… others may actually decrease speed

Reply
    Rohit Langde - May 14, 2012

    Each one is meant for something different, Sagas, with one thing in common- Optimal connection settings to give maximum possible speed.

    Reply
Paul roy - May 12, 2012

Why don’t you people use tixati. its gives far better speeds than utorrent. the only down part is that its a bit complicated for starters.

Reply
    Rohit Langde - May 14, 2012

    Thanks for letting me know about Tixati, Paul. I heard t for the first time but I will try it myself and compare with uTorrent.

    Reply
Sashank - May 12, 2012

I get a speed of 350-400 kbps already ..
cos i have my peer count and active conn values as 3000 and 4000

and Why should we enable encryption ? and why 80 for the key values ??

Reply
    Rohit Langde - May 12, 2012

    Some ISPs detect P2P Traffic and restricts the bandwidth resulting into slow downloading speed. So, Enabling Encryption can help in avoiding this issue and prevent them from identifying P2P download.
    About values of each parameter, each of them has different work allotted and after browsing several threads on uTorrent Forums. Studying them all and writing in blog post will make confusing to understand for most users so, I went as per the experts comments on assigning value to “80”. And yes, there are no adverse effects on my Download speed instead positive only.
    You can know about each of those terms in detail by pressing “F1” on uTorrent and searching each parameter.

    Reply
Kirti - May 16, 2012

Mostly enabling encryption slows your ping down, so you’d have difficulty starting your torrent at first. While this could take a minute or two at first, enabling encryption doesn’t provide a major boost at all.

Reply
Tronar - February 20, 2013

Sorry, but your “Some Advanced Tweaks” don’t make any sense at all. Why would you want to mess with values like “bt.ban_threshold”? Setting it from 3 (default) to 80 makes your torrent client only way too forgiving towards another client sending too many hashfailed pieces.

Those 6 parameters mentioned toggle totally different things and setting all of them to the same value of “80” is just outright nonsense, sorry.

Also “force starting” a torrent only means you will make him start, even if you have 6 torrents in the queue and your limit set to 5 parallel torrents. Usually the 6th torrent would remain in the queue until one of the other 5 torrents has alreay finished. Force starting a torrent only circumvents the maximum torrent setting. With potential negative results, because there is a reason torrent defines the maximum value according to your bandwidth selection at the beginning.

Reply
Tronar - February 20, 2013

If you are interested in an explanation for the advanced settings, this might be a good spot:
http://www.netcheif.com/Articles/uTorrent/html/AppendixA_02_12.html#Notes

@Kirti: turning on encryption while also checking the “legacy connection” checkbox does make a difference, if you happen to have an ISP that limits any kind of torrent related traffic (which many US providers tend to do). By encrypting your connection, you can sometimes circumvent that limitation. By still accepting legacy connections you make sure that older clients without encryption capabilities can still connect with you, so you don’t lose any opportunities. That’s why it is recommended to turn it on.

Reply

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