Peace, all.

I'm reporting KT is frustratingly slow for me. Using 2.2.2 now, and compared with several previous versions, usually using Kubuntu's official package, I see no difference in speed.

(BTW, *huge* difference in stability! Used 2.2.2 for a month without a single crash till two days ago, when it began behaving like previous versions -- crashes every hour or so. I used to run KT with a "watchdog" script that restarted it whenever DCOP calls failed.)

I've a 1.5Mbit ADSL, an old Alcatel Speed Touch modem/router that is difficult to pierce because it keeps forgetting NAPT assignments.

I do have occasional network problems (and DNS, too, lately) that my ISP failed to solve, but suggested might be MTU-related. So, the idea disagreements here may be related to OS issues seems worth an investigation...

I _did_ exerience twice or thrice torrents completing in two hours, doing 100KB/sec (my pipe's maximum), but hundreds of other torrents taking between a day and a month. I do not see a clear correlation with degree of seeding or whether (incoming?) ports were forwarded. Feels just like a fluke. Oh, and the share ratio is sometimes infuriating: over 3.0. Hey, I'm behind ADSL, pathetic uplink, I can't afford to upload these gigabytes, no? Does this mean anything?

I have not tried other bittorrent clients this year. (Using my "watchdog" I do manage to DL a CD or more each day. I can live with that, even though I'm bitter about it. :o)

I have KT running constantly, and use "killall --signal STOP ktorrent" when I need to use the net because KT saturates it completely -- even while the DL rate is less than 10KB/s! I did try throttling and various limits (number of DLs/ULs, etc) but it did not improve the situation at all.

I gave it some thought, and I will suggest that the "emotional exchanges" here (and in general), though seeming noisy, do contain useful content about user experience (UX) and should be read as such. Eg, asking ourselves (wearing developers or other contributors hats) how to address a specific "rant": can the problem of this customer-who-is-always-right be solved? Should we lose this specific customer on grounds of efficiency (too much effort) or lack of resources (no time to spare)? Is there a trend worth paying attention to (in the sense that Paul Graham suggests letting the market design the software)?

Specifically:
* The indicator that (incoming?) ports seem closed is an *excellent* improvement! Though I only saw it once when I installed 2.2.2. Want lots more similar features, please!
* No crash/debug info. I'm a programmer myself and my frustration with KT's code quality might nudge me into helping debug it, but the "learning curve" seems too steep.
* The log seems useless/meaningless to me.

So I'd love to see improvements that assist in analyzing performance (speeds as well as stability, usability...) at every level, eg: accessible/usable help in the FAQ, forums, etc, for "users"; debugging information for programmers; logs, tools, or techniques for traffic or protocol analysis, and so on.

Oh, and even talk like this, sort of "hand holding", helps me *a lot*. Otherwise it feels like FUD -- it doesn't work and I'm overwhelmed: what do I do? Start studying the code? The BT protocols? Analyze my net devices? Google for configuration advice? What?! (Personally, I can do them all, but, you know, got a life...?)

OK, some general ideas. I hope this helps ;o)
(I always want to get more involved, but, you know... And BTW, I believe "tools" such as this forum, a Wiki (!), FAQ, automatic crash reporting (such as Amarok's), etc, that can "harvest" micro-contributions and distribute and diversify the development efforts -- are the best thing to do. Open-sourcing rulez!!! ;o)

So, overall, I use KT because it integrates nicely with KDE (and Kubuntu), but I'm barely satisfied with its performance.

Thanks a lot to everyone here!

Oi, GiB.

You should perhaps try some other clients (it seems you haven't, at least this year ;-)), in order to confirm that it is KTorrent that offers pathetic bittorrent download speeds, not a feature of your ADSL itself.

Have you tried disabling DHT to stop KTorrent from killing your connection?

I kind of wish _I_ had problems like that, at least I could do some debugging.

Any specific wishes regarding features similar to that firewall indicator?

One suggestion to GiB is to possibly try to compile ktorrent yourself. It may be something with the pre-compiled binary.

@lucke one suggestion to go along with the firewall indicator, is if it does detect incoming connections to put a green checkbox, rather than nothing. Also maybe a possible indicator somewhere (probably in the peers section of the torrent and next to the firewall indicator) something to show whether you are using any encryption for your connections. I am curious to see how many people are using this so I can get an idea of whether enough people are using encryption that I can disable non-encrypted connections.

You can see whether you're using an encrypted connection with a given peer in peers window (a lock next to the IP).