I have been trying to use bittorrent. I installed bittorrent-gui. I downloaded a *.torrent file from a web site and told the bittorrent clicent to open that. The progress indicator said that it would take a week to download something that was 700MB. I am not sure what to move the slider to as I don't know what upload speed to use.
*confused*

Bittorrent's great... it really helps with stuff like downloading brand new releases of Linux distributions.

Let's say there's a file you really want on an ftp server somewhere. It's really, really popular, and thousands of other people are trying to download it. Only a certain amount of people can download it at once, and they've got to download the whole thing before the next guy can get to it. You can probably see how this could be a problem, right?

Bittorrent is quite a bit different. As soon as you've downloaded even a tiny portion of a file, you're already sharing it with others. Take the first example I used, but think about Bittorrent. You want this file, thousands of others want it, too. As soon as somebody has the first portion, they're sharing it with others - these people can start downloading it, too. It's as if instead of having one server allowing people to download, there are thousands. This speeds up big, popular downloads, and saves a lot of bandwidth (in the first example, the server uses up a lot of bandwidth - imagine sending a 700mb file to thousands of people! That would cost a LOT of money!).

The people who have the file downloaded are called seeders - they're sharing the file.

People who are downloading are called leechers. They can be sharing at the same time they're downloading. A lot of times, though, people will truly leech - downloading while not uploading!

Your problem is *probably* that there are no seeders - nobody is out there sharing the file. Go back to the site where you found the torrent and look for columns called something like S and L (for seeders and leechers). If you see a 0 under the S column, don't bother with the file - there's nobody out there with the full file who's sharing it. If you see a small number of seeders, say, 3, and 500 leechers, you'll still probably get a pretty slow download (at least at the beginning). The best time to download is when there are more seeders than leechers (or even better, NO leechers!).

The "upload" bar is so you can determine how fast you want to share files with others. You can put it right down and not share at all, but that sort of defeats the whole purpose of having bittorrent. I keep mine at 80, so I still share with others at a decent speed, but everybody probably has a different choice.

Baltika

Torrents are great man. and sometimes you gotta leave the program open, and it should find more ppl seeding your file that your trying to download.

you can always try other sites to find different torrents to the file you are looking for.

As for your download speeds, set it to what you have as an internet connection, if you have cable or DSL, if its 300k/20 or so, or 700/80k (down/up) just set it accordingly.

Hi,

If you don't know what your upload speed is you can use one of the speedtests you can find through google. The slider is used to define your upload speed so you should set it accordingly. There are rumors that if it's low the download speed will also be low but these are the rumors Another thing you should pay attention to when you download a .torrent is the seeders (ppl that have 100% of the file). more seeders usually (usually!) means better download speed.

I cant get Bittorrent or BitTornado to work! I cant run it, I can only get to BitTornado's file but IDK how to run it from there HELP EHLP HELP!

Everyone ignore the thread hijacker, it'll be fun

General: If you're getting average speeds you might need to forward some ports through your network so others can connect to you to share the file. You can find miles of information here.

if you ignore me you shall burn in the firey pits of hell!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA PUNY HUMANs!
i dont like to be ignored

Yeah, we can see that. Keep it up and attract the scorn of the moderators!