An often overlooked aspect of BitTorrent downloading is the magic of "throttling," whereby you periodically adjust the settings of the torrents running in your client server in order to achieve a desired result. Now what’s the desired result you ask? Well, it could be a variety of things. It could be to simply maintain your download vs upload ratio on a private tracker site, for instance, or perhaps to download a specific file more quickly. So too could it be that a torrent you have seeding is of a higher priority than a torrent that is downloading. In any event, we shall take a look at the reasons why you would want to throttle your torrents in the first place and how to go about it. The client server we will use to demonstrate this technique with will be Azureus.
Now if you aren’t using the Azureus BT client server already, you may download it here at Zeropaid. In addition, if you need assistance with setting it up, a guide on that too may be found here at Zeropaid.
The first thing we want to do is of course find a torrent so that we may download some files and have an example of throttling for us to go over. Being that I cannot show an example here that incorporates a torrent from one of those "illegal" sites, I have had to be creative and use a site called Legaltorrents.com.
To prove that the site truly is "wholesome" and legal in nature, I’ve provided a few pictures here to disprove the skeptics at large (you can never be too careful these days).
As you can see, it reads "Monotonik is a net music label that exclusively releases music online in the mp3 format. All of our releases are freely downloadable and distributable under a Creative Commons License that allows free non-commercial distribution…"
So now that that’s out of the way let’s get down to business. Returning to the Legaltorrents.com site, I selected the torrent for Monotonik Net Label’s 2006 releases to download.
Now after the torrent loads let’s reprise an important note. If the health status of the torrent, denoted by a face, that you see in the main window is any color other than green, chances are your ports are not properly forwarded, in which case a guide for doing so can be found here at Zeropaid.
Now after loading the torrent we will see it begin to download, its speed shown below.
In order to make the picture plain, we will rightly need several torrents downloading simultaneously in order to throttle them. Returning to Legaltorents.com, I quickly selected 2 other torrents to download in the Azureus BitTorrent client server. I’ve included snapshots below so that you may see and verify the process.
After loading each of the torrents and ensuring that all are "healthy," it’s important to double-check that our "upload" setting is optimized. For me this means a setting of approximately 50kB/S based on my internet connection speed.
Now that the torrents are all properly downloading it’s time to go over all this "throttling" business.
First off, an issue of foremost concern when it comes to downloading from private tracker sites is ones "ratio," or the amount you’ve downloaded vs the amount you’ve uploaded. Many have made the mistake of leaving a torrent unattended for a period of time only to return and find themselves unexpectedly banned from the private tracker site that they downloaded from. The reason being that they were able to download something at a far greater rate than they were able to upload it, thus causing their ratio to spiral downwards and in turn result in their getting banned. The easiest way to keep this from happening is by merely "throttling", or dialing down the maximum download speed you will allow for that specific torrent. How do you do this you ask? Read on.
To throttle the maximum download speed first select the torrent you wish to do so for. Then "right-click" the torrent and scroll over as shown below, from "Advanced" to "Set Down Speed." to the desired setting. Now being that, as shown, the download speed greatly surpasses the speed 130 to 15, we will throttle the download speed to 20kB/s. It will mean that our download time will increase dramatically but, it will ensure that we are able to maintain our download to upload ratio as well. To note, this of course important only on private torrent sites and not on public ones like Torrentspy for instance.
Conversely, if a given torrent was using all the upload bandwidth and thereby choking off the ability of other torrents to download at a decent speed, you can throttle that as well. It’s the same process for throttling the download speed to a point. FIrst select the torrent whose upload speed you wish to throttle. Then "right-click" it and scroll across from "Advanced" to "Set Up Speed" to the desired setting. Sometimes if left unchecked a torrent will upload data at a rate that will max out your upload bandwidth capacity, thus as an example we will throttle this ones to 20kB/s. You really don’t ever want to go below 15kB/s when it comes to uploading speed, and recall that the faster your upload rate the faster your download rate. However, if you have multiple torrents downloading and one is using all your upload speed then it’s a good idea to set a maximum for it. The images below should the process more clear for you.
Okay so now that we’ve gone over how to throttle the speeds of torrents that are solely downloading, it’s a good idea to address a scenario whereby you have a mixture where some torrents are seeding as well. Having allowed 2 of the torrents I downloaded to finish, we now have a good example to go over. If you’ll notice in the picture below the selected torrent is seeding at a rate of 28.8kB/s. Now again, being that I have a maximum upload capacity of 52kB/s or so with my internet connection, 28.8kB/s is more than 50% of my total capacity, especially if my global rate is set at 50kB/s. What this means is that there is much less available for what I am downloading that what I am sharing. This may be fine for the gratuitous type, but I like my downloads to be the center of attention at all times. So what we can do here is throttle the maximum upload speed for the seeding torrent. To do so do the same as described previously by first "right-clicking" the torrent and then scrolling from "Advanced" to "Set Up Speed" to the desired setting. A setting of 20kB/s is more than adequate.
Okay that pretty much covers throttling and then some. The last thing of interest that I think deserves some mention is the priority status of each torrent. When downloading a mere couple torrents or so it’s not as important, but with a handful or so it can mean all the difference. Notice below that there are 3 torrents currently downloading. The one currently listed as 3rd in priority, Monotonik 2006, is really first in priority in my mind. Its speeds aren’t affected tremendously as again, there only a few downloading, but could be a problem if I added another torrent or so. Irregardless, by increasing its’s priority, which is done by selecting the torrent first then by clicking the up arrow, we increase the number of connections it will be able to make with peers via its tracker. Alternately, you can use the down arrow to diminish a torrent’s priority and thereby number of connections as well.
Moreover, I hope this article give you a bit of insight into what measures you can take to get the most from your internet connection and so too Azureus, your BT client server.
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