I've been trying to use several bittorrent clients (currently bittornado) and getting really low speeds. I have a 1mbps connection which i have requested to upgrade to 2.5mbps (not sure if they've done that yet) and can get decent speeds downloading direct and with peer 2 peer clients but for some reason this is painfully slow. Any ideas?

I have norton personal firewall which I think I've set up correctly but other than that no ideas. Please help, thanks.

I've got a 3mbps True net access and the fastest torrent speed I ever hadwas 140kilobytes/sec. I often get 80-100 for well seeded items

Don't forget the DL speed is dependent on how many seeds and what upload setting. I set mine to 20

withnail, you didn't mention what speeds your getting! On my True 512/256 I'm getting between 10-60...It seems to be getting slower and slower. These days I'm happy if I can get 30 but it's usually around the 15 mark unfortunately. Remember if your using a router you need to forward your ports.

about the same sort of speeds as you are getting which is bad considering the difference in our connections

Now l know very little about BitTorrent but l have seen this sort of issue discussed on other computer forums and the answer almost always seems to come down to what BitTorrent client you're using, plus of course the settings you are using. There seems to be a lot of variance depending on which client you use. Doesn't appear that the broadband speed has much to do with the problem.

No point in me trying to tell you what to do as l have only a passing interest, other than to say that a bit of Googling is in order as the info is out there. From what I've read you may have a bit of work to do if you want to make BitTorrent worthwhile. Many people soon become disillusioned with it.

Yeah, you need to config your system right and some people do get better results with certain clients. I've tried it all trust me, and come to the conclusion that True throttle some p2p ports. Still what do you expect for 800B PM?

I've been using BT for nearly 2 years now. You can never really tell what speed to expect IMHO.

In the olden days it was great as there were no other clients than the official one so nobody was throttling their upload speed. I ALWAYS got 100/sec but with the advent of more and more BT clients most people, myself included, choose to throttle the upload.

I set mine to 20 but I think many must set theirs to 1-5, especially if they are just seeding