Recently we told you about the Top 5 free BitTorrent clients to start making use of the vast amount of torrents available. Choosing a good client is one thing, and setting it up correctly is another. There’s not much sense having a fast internet connection but not making the best use of it, is there? Consequently, if you have an average connection, you’d like to squeeze every last drop out of it. Therefore, we give you a few simple tweaks to help boost those torrent download speeds! You don’t have to be a real network whiz to optimize download speeds, but a little networking knowledge sure does help. So here are 5 easy ways to speed up torrent downloads:

Ways to speed up torrent downloads:

Choose the right BitTorrent client: 

It goes without saying, but do get yourself one of the popular BitTorrent clients that support all download protocols and is light on resources. Also, make sure to keep the client of your choice updated to the latest version for stability and security purposes. μTorrent is the fastest and lightest BitTorrent client out there and hardly takes up  a megabyte or less of disk space.

Choose a healthy torrent: 

Often, there are multiple torrents for the same condition. Go for the torrent that has the highest number of seeds. Higher the seeds, the more stable and high download speeds you will get, since seeds already have a complete copy of the file and are only uploading. Most torrent sites also employ a user rating system, so preferably choose the torrent that has been rated highly by users to avoid fakes or malware infested files.

Set a firewall exception: 

If you’re seeing oddly low download speeds or an error in connecting even after selecting a healthy torrent, your firewall is probably blocking the BitTorrent client. Most clients have an option in preferences/settings to “Add exception to Windows Firewall”. Make sure that option remains ticked.  Still, go to Control Panel –> Windows Firewall –> Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall and add your BitTorrent client to the list. For users with a separate Internet Security/Antivirus/Firewall program, check the appropriate settings in the program and allow your BitTorrent client internet access.

Limit download and upload rate:

It sounds counter productive, but to obtain constant optimum download speeds, you must set your maximum download and upload speeds to a particular value. Using any speed test found online, first find out your maximum download and upload rate. Now, in your BitTorrent client settings,  set maximum download speed to 110% or 120% of the speed you obtained in the speed test. Similarly, set the maximum download speed to 80% of the speed you obtained in the speed test. These setting will ensure a proper ratio and will bring about constant speeds.

Set proper number of active torrents: 

By default the BitTorrent client sets a pretty high number of active torrents. So it may set multiple torrents to download and upload simultaneously. We recommend setting maximum active torrents to 3 and maximum active downloads to 1. That way, even when a download is active, only 2 other torrents will be seeding. This serves the dual purpose of bandwidth conservation and still makes you an active member of the BitTorrent network by seeding the file(s) you downloaded.

These were the 5 easy ways to speed up torrent downloads. So have fun downloading, and don’t forget to seed!

Highly Suggested Articles:

1. Top 5 Free BitTorrent Clients For Windows PC – Best of 2012
2. BitTorrent 7.6 Client for Windows – Advance Torrent Features, New Apps
3. How to Speed Up Torrents In BitTorrent and UTorrent