Why are torrents so slow to download

Some are under your control router issues, port forwarding, and misconfigured settings in your torrent client uTorrent, QBittorrent etc. Torrents and file-sharing use massive amounts of bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. File-sharing has consistently been one of the biggest bandwidth hogs, especially for upstream bandwidth.

This is done in two ways:. Still others prefer to block access to torrent sites themselves like isohunt and thepiratebay. This practice is common in places like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Russia. This is commonly used on high-bandwidth data streams, such as:.

If you ever wondered by your youtube videos are constantly buffering or running in low resolution even though your connection is 10mpbs or faster, the answer is simple. Even better, it can usually fix slowness caused by in-client protocol encryption or port forwarding issues as well which is a pain to setup manually on your router. A significant percentage of torrent users will see a speed boost after signing up for a fast VPN service. Oh, and a VPN will make your downloads more private too, helping you hide your IP address from torrent peers.

The benefits of a VPN go way beyond privacy. Many issues that cause slow torrents can be instantly fixed when you use a fast VPN provider. Slow torrents caused by: Throttling In order to throttle your torrent traffic , your Internet Provider has to be able to:.

Blocked Torrents Some Internet Providers try to block torrent traffic altogether. Comcast, for example, reportedly tried to block all upstream seeding torrent bandwidth. This header is essential, it allows data to get routed to the correct destination, and the correct software program that is looking for that time of incoming data your torrent client.

These headers also make it very easy for your internet provider to filter and block torrent data packets, while allowing the rest of your data to go through unblocked. When you use a VPN, the encryption prevents your ISP from reading these headers, making it impossible to block torrents without blocking everything.

This causes your torrent speed to drop bigtime. Port forwarding is a big pain, and you have to reconfigure it everytime your router assigns a new internal ip address to your computer Argh. We should also mention that some ISPs try and throttle internet speeds. This particular fix is only worth trying if all your torrents are slow to download instead of just one.

A peer is someone who is downloading the file i. In an active Torrent transfer, if the number of seeders is less than the number of peers, your file will take longer to download. The greater the seeder-to-peer ratio, the slower a file will download. For example, if there is only one seeder for a file, and ten peers, it will download much slower than a file that has five seeders and ten peers.

Alternatively, you can look for a different torrent of the same file that has more seeders. Your email address will not be published. Adding trackers to torrents doesn't help with speeds. All it does is put extra strain on the trackers. Start new topic. Recommended Posts. Posted April 10, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options DreadWingKnight Posted April 10,