How to increase bit torrent speeds - Part One

There are a couple of ways which you can employ to improve your download speeds while using bit torrent. I have been an avid user of torrents for quite some time. Here I am going to share with you, some of the settings or tricks by which I try to attain the maximum allowed bandwidth and download speed.

Always use PEER GUARDIAN

This is the most important thing to do when you are downloading using torrents. Remember, when you sometimes download that 'movie' or download that series and your bandwidth graph shows you’re your download speed is the maximum available bandwidth of your connection, but the progress bar does not increase as it should, and the hash files or wasted files size keep increasing. This happens when you are trying to download a poisoned torrent.

You can search more about poisoned torrents, but for the moment you just need to remember that this will cause your torrent client to download a lot of unwanted hash/waste files which are trying to appear as genuine content of the file you are attempting to download. Most of the time, this is being done by people who are trying to give you a hard time because you maybe downloading their content or movie.

You can prevent these people from connecting to your computer and sending you waste files by using peer guardian. Now you won’t have to wonder why the file which is supposed to be downloaded within 3 hours is taking days to finish.

What peer guardian does is, it has an updatable database of IP addresses which people have found to be actively poisoning torrents. It also has other categories of IP addresses which you could prevent from connecting to your computer, such as known government IP addresses, known educational bodies IP addresses which might be monitoring P2P for studies purposes, etc.

So to conclude, Peer Guardian will assist you to be partially invisible to monitoring bodies such as governments, movie companies, and so forth. It also helps you to download the content faster by preventing known computers from sending you fake files or waste data. This is a must have tool for any bit torrent user.

I almost forgot… Peer Guardian is open source software, thus you don’t have to worry about it having a backdoor or spyware which might be collecting information about you.

I will continue with the second part in the next post. Do let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments.

Torrent client software : http://www.bittorrent.com/
Peer Guardian software : http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/