This is something I only recently started seeing. It takes a lot longer for torrents to get up to full speed. It used to be that as soon as it was loaded, Id connect to many people and it'd immediately saturate my connection (1-3MB/s) if there were enough people sharing, or if I had enough torrents loaded.. But now when I start even a popular torrent it takes a couple minutes for it to even connect to a single peer, and even then it takes longer to get up to full speed (if it ever gets there), and to finish.

I used to be able to pull a 300MB file in 5-10 minutes. Now its somewhere around 40-80 minutes. It doesn't seem to matter what tracker the torrent is from, or what size the torrent is...

I have to agree with this. Something is wrong with download speed (and upload speed?) when torrent has many leechers and few seeders (1:1 or less). I have just tested the same torrent with vuze and it outperforms ktorrent ~5 times right from the start of downloading... What is more, vuze is capable of keeping download speed way more stable at such high rates than ktorrent. Both ktorrent 3.1.3 (though I have not tested it extensively, been using svn trunk for quite some time) and svn trunk seem to suffer from this problem.

I remember that ktorrent 2.2 had somewhat slow start, but after 10-20MB or so downloaded, speed used to get back to OKish/fast and stable.

On the other hand, when there are way more seeders than leechers, ktorrent downloads full speed. Therefore, I think there is a problem with choking algorithm or ktorrent is not aggressive or clever (request-wise) enough.

2 days ago I fixed a problem which caused requests queues to fill up, resulting in no requests being sent to peers in some cases. This could be the problem you are seeing.

However if you are having trouble connecting to peers, then it must something else. What do you see in the logging when you start up a torrent ?