Hi, I have grown fed up with the slow speeds of my downloads while using KTorrent. It's not like my speeds aren't bad because rarely I was able to get speeds over 300 kb/s but it seems that Ktorrent seems to fail at finding good candidates to leech off of. It's stalled most of the time, and then sometimes a download may flicker to around 5kb/s before declining steadily into a dead stall where it will stay throughout the next 4-5 hours before it sees any of it's .3kb/s times. It seems I average about 1 month to download any ~700mb video. I have tried port forwarding (which I doubted because I was able to get high speeds at times), and with that came turning on uPnP. I have tried Manually Anouncing, did nothing. So today I decided I'd try a Torrent that I've been trying to download using KTorrent on Transmission BitTorrent Client and it suddenly dawned on me that not all Torrent downloading is super slow. Whenever I check my Transmission BitTorrent Client the speeds are well over 100kb/s. Now one would say then that it's time to switch Clients. Well I say, no, because I love the user interface in KTorrent. So what I want to know is, why is my KTorrent so slow? And how can I make it faster?
I am using:

KTorrent 2.2.5 (Using KDE 3.5.9)
Ubuntu Hardy
D-Link Router

Thanks in advance!

First try to update to the latest version of ktorrent, which is 2.2.7 or 3.1.2.
Then make sure you have done a proper configuration of your client, a good knowledge base is this guide made by the utorrent developer.

http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-develo ... ps-080805/

I know exactly what you are talking about. I experienced the same slowness as you did but with one big difference: I'm using ktorrent 3.1.2 on KDE4.

When I noticed that ktorrent was very slow on pretty popular torrents with many seeds I started to compare it to other clients like deluge and qbittorrent on the same torrent file. The result was clear: deluge and qbittorrent (that both rely on the rasterbar libtorrent) where much faster than ktorrent. Sadly it seems like only a few people are experiencing this problem and it seems to highly depend where and what you are about to download. It mostly occurs on torrents where the leechers outreach the seeders by factor 3 - 5 (eg on torrents where people don't want to upload that much). Speeds are just fine on torrents with more seeders than leechers.
I also love ktorrent because of its many features and the nice interface but I learned to not use it again on large torrents because it takes much longer to finish.

There are currently some big changes in memory management code and this might increase the speed (am I right?). I'm currently building from svn to see if there is an improvement and maybe you should do the same.

Thanks for the replies, I will try the suggestions listed when I get home tonight. I'm hoping a simple update will fix it, but I am willing to do just about anything. I am sort of new to Ubuntu and Linux in general but I am an advanced ex-Windows user so I can usually figure stuff out. So any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks again!