Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

I am trying to download episodes of Lost as in the UK season 3 is only being shown on Sky (satellite) which I don't have. ABC's website says I am not in the US and wont let me play them.

So I thought I will use kTorrent to get the episodes. I am new to all this, but did a search and found the files I wanted and next to it it said S=8373, D=2610. I found out this meant Seeders and Leechers.

All is great and I start downloading. most of the time the status is on stalled, or if it is downloading it fluctuates between 0.1kbs and 3.0kbs.

The first episode (347mb) took me about 2 weeks (24/7) to download and about 700mb has been uploaded from me.

A friend told me to share more and I will get better speeds. But that doesn’t work. Another friend said set the upload limit to 1kb/s, which slowed the uploads but didn't speed up the downloads.

I updated kTorrent to make sure I am on the latest version.

Any help or advice please?

Maybe you haven't configured KTorrent nicely.

What for internet connection do you have?
What is the configuration in download tab?
Does your ISP throttle you connection?

I have the same problem. Downloads are always stalled, only occasionally flicker 'Downloading'. When I had two torrents, they d/l OK, but when I queued about 8 torrents, it stopped working, so I am thinking it may be a performance issue -- it's not a NAT problem, since the windows machine on the same network downloads torrents at full speed, no problem.

I connect through a ADSL router
It has the following NAT rules: (port forwarding)

Global address ANY
Local address 10.1.1.3 - 10.1.1.7
Source port TCP/UDP 6881 - 6889 to Local port 6881 (default bittorrent)
Source port TCP/UDP 50000 - 50008 to Local port 50000 (alternate bittorrent)
Source port UDP 50009 - 50017 to Local port 50009 (direct host transfer)

My connection speed: 1500 kbps / 256 kbps

My ktorrent settings:
max d/l # : 4
max seed : 4
max connections per torrent : 120
global connection limit : 800
maximum upload rate : 16 KB/s
maximum download rate : 100 KB/s
port: 50000
UDP tracker port: 50000
Number of upload slots: 4

DHT - [X] Use DHT to get additional peers
UDP port for DHT communication : 50009

One thing I miss in the ktorrent interface is an indicator wether I'm reachable or not, like the green/yellow/red lights in Azureus and BitTornado.

I'm currently trying 2.0.3, I will try an newer build next.

Please first try a newer version , 2.0.3, or even better, the 2.1 beta or the latest 2.1 svn snapshots. Older versions of KTorrent did have such issues with poor download performance.

Also:

(1) Limiting your upload to an absurdly low rate like 1kb/s will NOT help your download speed. It will most likely harm it. This makes you almost totally dependent on the graciousness of seeds to hand you pieces, and with all the other peers from the swarm also wanting a turn from the seeds, you'll have to wait a long time to get more data. If you don't send adequate data back to peers, they won't give you any more pieces.

(2) More connections != better download speeds. Try limiting your number of connections to some conservative numbers, like 20-50 connections per torrent, or perhaps even less than that. Some buggy routers easily are swamped by too many connections and might even simply gridlock all traffic if they are overloaded.

(3) Try turning off DHT. Some routers have really limited # of UDP spaces in the routing table (like 255 'connections' max). Overloading that can cause the router to behave erratically. Since DHT is a connectionless (UDP) protocol, it really isn't feasible to "limit" the number of connections because you can't control whether or not someone else will connect to you.

Try reducing your maximum number of connections. There's not much you can do wrong with ktorrent's simplistic config but that could cause some people issues, especially if you don't have the RAM for swap. Set upload to about 80% of the maximum of your connection. Point was made before that peers upload to those who upload to them, but you don't want to set it so high as to delay ACKS. Limit upload slots somewhat so that each peer gets decent bandwidth and thus they can fight over who gets the speed burst from you(effective way of manually setting snubbing), Good luck. These guys have made it an excellent and stable client.

PS-Only issue I had since install was a stupid one. I had a cannot open blah blah blah permission denied and the issue was simply I had to allow ktorrent full permission to the torrent directory in my distro of Linux.(feels dumb but at least I worked on it and fixed it, thus didn't need to ask for help only to be told to give ktorrent permission).

Hi all,

I am still having a few troubles downloading. I have reduced all my setting as per below, but still it is stalled or very slow. I notice that all the peers I connect to come up as either Snubbed = Yes or Choked = Yes. Also people are uploading off me at 40kbs nearly constantly and I download at about 3kbs.

Maximum Downloads = 10
Maximum Seeds = 20
Maximum connections per torrent = 20
Global Connection Limit = 20
Maximum upload rate = 40
Maximum Download Rate = 50
Port = 6881
UDP Tracker Port = 4444
Number off upload slots = 10
Keep seeding after download is finished = Yes

I am using Ktorrent 2.0.3 and KDE 3.5.3 on Simply Mepis. I am on a 8mb ADSL connection to BT in the UK using a wired router.

You should install 2.1beta1