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Introduction
This guide shows how to speed up downloads in Vuze. All bittorrent programs need to have their incoming and outgoing communications flow freely in order to achieve the highest download speeds and that is essentially what this guide is about.
This guide was put together using information given by the developers of bittorrent programs at their forums, guides and FAQs. There are no secret tricks, just the real basics of proper set up of a bittorrent program. Following these simple steps should result in increased download speed.
These are the basic principles of optimizing a bittorrent client, like Vuze, for speed:
- Choose a proper port to avoid ISP blocks and conflicts with other programs
- Forward that port through any software firewall and router to allow incoming connections
- Adjust internal settings based upon upload capacity of the internet connection to allow room for outgoing communications and to distribute upload efficiently.
There are some programs that claim to optimize speed in Vuze. Such programs are a scam and generally contain adware or spyware. I have seen it said, by the developers of all bittorrent programs, that nothing will increase your download speed in a bittorrent client more than the basic steps set forth herein.
Note When viewing this guide in Internet Explorer the Mac command key symbol appears as a box. I do not know why yet. Also, in IE, this guide is now showing at the bottom of the page, with the top blank. This apparently is due to the recent change in layout here, but the reason has not been determined.
This guide is applicable to all versions of Vuze (or the previous Azureus), BitTyrant and TopBT on Vuze.
Choosing A Proper Port
To avoid messing up a network connection that is already cleared, first check and see if your communications are blocked or are already clear.
Click to Test Your Port Success-just go to Adjusting Internal Settings. Error- follow all steps.
Depending on your Mode setting, you may only see one number
If you failed the port test above, then you should first set your port to a proper one. The most important choice here is to avoid using a port within the 6881-6999 range. This was the range originally used by bittorrent programs and is often blocked by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). (If your port was in this range, change and re-test). The safest choice is a port in the 49152-65534 range as this will avoid ISP blocks and possible conflicts with other applications.
Azureus-Wiki: Port is Blacklisted
Forwarding The Port
Introduction
A router will block incoming communications unless an exception is made. All software firewalls will block incoming communications and most will also block outgoing communications, unless an exception is made. If you are "firewalled", then other people will not be able to initiate connections with you (see Why Is Being Firewalled Bad).
As there are many firewalls and routers, this guide can not give explanations as to each. However, there are guides available, on the internet for most firewalls and routers and this guide will link you to them.
Software Firewall - The permission should be set to allow TCP and UDP in both directions. Generally, you will have a choice to set permission for the Vuze port or for the Vuze program. Setting permission for the port is the safer choice. You can check these options for guides:
- The help file of your software firewall is the best place to look
- The µTorrent forum has some guides posted
- PortForward.com Firewall Guides(choose firewall and then Azureus) also has some guides.
Router - There are two choices here. The easier way is to use UPnP (NAT-PMP in Mac). However, this has a possible security issue. Using UPnP, or NAT-PMP, allows any program to create a port mapping through the router without consent of the owner. The other choice is to manually forward the port through the router. This does not have that security issue, but involves going through several steps to accomplish. Using the guides linked herein, this should not be that difficult and is the preferred method.
UPnP (NAT-PMP in Apple) - The Easy Way - Enable UPnP (NAT-PMP for Apple) in Vuze and router.
Automatically refresh mappings when NAT status is "firewalled" should also be enabled.
Manual Forwarding-The Preferred Way
- UPnP (NAT-PMP) must be disabled in Vuze (see Images above).
- Use the Static IP Guide.
- Set permission for Vuze port. This should be set to allow both TCP and UDP communications.
You can check these options for guides:
- The help file of your router is the best place to look
- Portforward.com Azureus Router Index has guides for most routers
Click Here to Re-Test Port Success-Proceed to next step. Error- re-do steps or seek help in Forums.
Adjusting Internal Settings
Introduction
The most important setting here is to cap upload in Vuze to 80% of your overall upload capacity. Setting upload in Vuze is a fine line. The more upload you give, the more download you will get from other peers. However, if upload is set too high, or to unlimited, then download speeds will suffer as outgoing communications (acknowledgment signals, resend requests etc) will be interfered with. Other adjustments are made here to distribute your upload so that you receive back the most download from other peers.
This section of the guide is based on the Azureus-Wiki: Good Settings page.
Mode
To make sure that you can see all the options referenced here you should be in Mode = Advanced.
Speed Test: Speedtest.net (Click for Test)
First the upload capacity of your internet connection must be determined by taking an online speed test. Speedtest.net has test locations worldwide and will highlight the one closest to you.
To take the test you must have Flash installed and javascript enabled.
Before taking the speed test, press Settings in the upper left of the speedtest.net page and make certain the Speed Measurement is set to kilobytes. This will help in inputing into the caculator below.
You should stop all internet activity, including torrents, before taking the test and the test should be taken a few times to obtain a reliable average. Results will now show in KiloBytes. It is the upload rate that is important here.
Another Way To Test Upload Speed
For most people these test results will be reliable (Comcast users see Note). However, you may wish to do a double check on real life upload speed. When you are seeding a torrent with a good number of peers and you are using your upload cap, set upload to unlimited and watch for about 5-10 minutes and see where upload settles in at. Then input that number into the calculator in the kiloBytes section.
Note: Some ISPs will show inaccurate results on the speed test. If your ISP has anything like Comcast's PowerBoost, then your results will show higher than the actual speed of your connection. PowerBoost provides a burst of download and upload speeds above your provisioned download and upload speeds for the first 10MB and 5MB respectively. Since the speed test involves relatively small files, this will skew results upward. If you have PowerBoost, or something similar, you should initially use the speed test results and then use the test method in the paragraph above.
Calculator: Azureus Upload Settings Calculator
Once you have an average upload speed for your connection go to the online Azureus Upload Settings Calculator. Although designed for Azureus, this calculator will work for all bittorrent clients.
Enter your average upload speed in the appropriate box
The calculator will automatically give the proper figures to adjust various options in µTorrent.
Input Results Into Vuze - Screen shots of locations in Vuze of settings to be adjusted
Good Torrents
The above settings should work well most of the time. Downloads of individual torrents depends on other factors. See Good Torrents
Related Articles
- Additional Vuze Settings Help with ISP interference and other options
- Searching for Torrents Popular and unique torrent search sites, with comments.
- Finding Legal (and Free) Torrents sites that offer only legally downloadable and distributable content.
Gizmo's Best Ever Freeware Forums
If you still have issues after using this guide and would like some assistance, please post in Networking & Internet section of our forums. The comment section here is not well set up for ongoing discussions and the forums would be a better place to post as there will be a seperate thread for your discussion and keeping track of our discussion will be much easier.
Those who wish to post a thanks may post here or in the forums. I always appreciate hearing from those who this helped and I do read the posts regularly. I used to respond to each thanks, but realized it was clogging up the comments section. I thank all those who have posted their appreciation and all those who will.
If you have a suggestion or correction for the guide, you may post here or in the forums.
Older posts on issues that were made here have been deleted as they were clogging up the comments section
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Would this work if I'm using a public wifi?
Capping upload will always help.
However, you probably will not have access to the router. The only thing you can try is to enable UPnP, although it is likely that is disabled at the router. Just depends on how diligent the public wifi operator is. BitTorrent eats up a lot of bandwidth and can disrupt other users of the wifi.
I have a Belkin router F5D7633-4 and have set-up a static I.P and tried opening a new port through the 192.168.2.1 settings page.But the health smiley still comes up as yellow though the download speed has increased slightly. i tried to check my port after following the guide but it still comes up with error. Anyone know what could be the problem? Thanks
What port number are you using?
Did you also set an exception in your software firewall?
What other security software are you using?
Do you also have a modem? If so, what is make and model?
What operating system are you using?
what the f_ck its working
Thank you my good man!! It worked!
Hiya Steve once again,
I just wanted to know if i can uninstall and re-install vuze so Vuze can be reset to its initial settings.
My speeds have really gone down recently and i think i have done something that i don't know how to undo that's caused the slow speeds - something isn't right.
When i re-install Vuze, the settings come back as before i un-installed.
Hope you don't mind me asking this question, but i feel i have been tweaking something that has gone wrong and can't undo.
Cheers mate,
David, Sheffield, England :)
To get back to the original settings (in Windows), you need to uninstall the azureus.config and the azureus.config.bak files in the Azureus application data folder (usually c:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Azureus) I just checked and it is still called Azureus in the AppData folder.
You also can access the folder through Vuze at Tools>Options>Files. At the bottom of the page is a link to the folder.
You need to exit Vuze first before deleting the files-true for below also
In Mac they are in the Application Support folder (/Users//library/Application Support/Azureus folder).
Linux, I guess it depends on the distribution/package. Apparently you just search for azureus.config.
Thanks, Steve, You're a star! :)
Awesome speed improvement following your instructions! Thanks loads.
Um, if you want speed, why would you use Vuze!?
I wish I had learned about uTorrent / MicroTorrent ages ago.
how do i get utorrent & microtorrent, please. i to have slow download speed.
I use both Vuze and uTorrent and they get the same speeds when properly set up.
If you are having speed issues with Vuze, you will have the same issue with uTorrent.
Did you go through this guide?
The steps to good speed are the same for all bittorrent clients.
Hi I am totally new to Azureus and I cannot and do not know how to get the right port. Mine is set to 17483 but it says unable to test or invalid port. I have tried other numbers, but am really a total beginner, live in Zambia and want to download movies. My speed is only at best 12 kB/s. I did a speed test and it said upload is 0.01 mbs and download is 0.11mbs. Please help me Steve. Thanks in the meantime.
With that connection you are not going to get much higher speeds anyways.
The speed test is showing results in bits (b) and Vuze shows speeds in bytes (B).
8b = 1B so the down speed of 0.11mbps = 110kbps = 13.75kBps.
Figuring in some overhead etc., the 12kBps is probably the best you can see.
Really the only thing important about a port number is not choosing one in the 6881-6999 range. It is not choosing the right port number that gets it cleared.
To clear the port an exception for Vuze needs to be set in any firewall or router on your system. Either of those will block incoming communications and all ports will show closed until the exception is made.
There are links to guides to set those exceptions in this guide above.
If you can not find a guide, let me know your firewall make and version and router make and model.
Steve
Hi, sorry for not using the forum, but it doesnt seem that anyone has ever talked about vuze or azureus as it used to be called there. I have a few problems. when i ran the speed test my upload speed was 4.33 mb/s whis is considerably less than yours of 1106. Despite this, I compared my speed on speedtest.net with their tool, and i am above average for my isp and my state. How is this possible? Also, i chose to ignore this strange thing and entered it into the calculator anyways. I got numbers for everything and entered them in and my downloads slowed by about 50 -90 %. For some reaon, in the calculator i didnt get any result for the max upload slots per torrent, it just says NaN. I tried googling this and got no results. I tried entering this into vuze settings but it wont allow you to type letters. Is my problem that i should take out the decimal? is that why you have 1106 bits per second? If so, it might be a good idea to add a note of that for less techie people like me. But anyways, thanks for the guide its real awesome of you to take the time to help people like this.
So yeah, i figured out my math problem, so sorry for posting that. I just had to convert speedtest's mb/s into Kb/s. That was pretty confusing at first. But still, with those settings, i see absolutely no difference. i guess it is possible mine was already optimized when i downloaded it but im still pretty disappointed in a day DL time for a 4.44 gig file with 22 out of 64 seeds. I was wondering if maybe its because i dont know how to adjust the amount of upload slots for currently downloading files like it says on the calculator. The wording of all that is pretty vague. Im glad people took the time to do that but it seems pretty easy to explain that one part as well so people like me dont get screwed.
The speedtest site used to give results in kilobits by default and I noticed it is giving result in megabits by default. I will have to either add language to check the settings there or find another speed test site.
I am not sure what you are saying on the upload slots. I entered your results in the calculator and got 433kBps as upload cap (you have a very high upload rate) and 7 upload slots per torrent.
I just checked in my Vuze and when upload slots are changed in the Options menu, they are changed on active torrents.
Could you try and explain your issue on this setting more?
Anyways, I do not think upload slots would be the reason for download speed not increasing. What was your result for download on the test?
What is the speed you are getting on the torrent you mentioned?
Check and see what the "Swarm Average" is for that torrent (Right-click>Show Details>General tab on the upper left)
Steve
Hi Steve, thanks for the reply. Yes, the speedtest results confused me at first but I just use a conversion tool to figure it out. For the speed tests, my average upload was 4.3 mb/s and my average download was ~17.45 mb/s. Using a simple online converter( with kilo weighted for bandwidth) I got 4300 kilobits, or 537.5 kB/s.
I guess this is really high since the azureus wiki only has settings listed for kb/s under 768 or something like that. And because my Dl speeds don't even compare to the results other people have said they got thanks to your guide this is even more confusing.
With the upload slots, I was just referring to the azureus calculator which says "Dont forget to adjust the number of upload slots your currently running torrents too" underneath the max upload slots per torrent box ( 7 for me I guess). I thought this might have been my problem because i couldn't see a way to do this, until I figured out where the torrents individual options were, and yes, they do update themselves automatically. But in the end, when I compare my speeds to the swarm I seem to be pretty average.
My last remaining confusion is the fact that my download speed is consistently much lower than my upload speed, and i thought the opposite was typically true. Perhaps I need to lower my upload limit and performance would improve? On the torrent I am working on now mostly, I am getting an average of ~ 19 kB/s but with occasional ( exhilarating) spikes of up to 60 or 65 kB/s. These are essentially the speeds i was getting on old azureus last year before i gave up ( comcast connection throttling) and on this new install without any settings optimized. The swarm average is ~32 kB/s. So i might just be crying wolf about a generally slow torrent, but anyways, thank you very much for trying to help me out.
I think you are correct on trying a lower upload limit. You should be getting much more than swarm average. I usually get at least 5 times and yours should be even higher. The fact that your download is lower than your upload is a sign that something is wrong.
If the torrent you are on has enough peers to exhaust your upload, you might try setting your upload to unlimited for a bit and see what it settles in at (let it run that way for about 5-10 minutes). Then cap upload at 80% of that. (you could use the calculator with the kilobytes entry)
Comcast has something called power boost which affects the test results. Power boost only runs for the first 30MBs and since the speed tests use relatively small files, this can skew the results to the high end.
I believe it used to be that you had to change current running torrents separately, but that must have changed.
Good Luck
Steve
Thanks again for the response and advice steve. i did as you suggested and got my upload on unlimited. I have now reduced it to 80% of that and almost instantly i saw Dl shoot up to 160 - 185 kB/s. Thank you so much for your patience and assistance. You rock.
Always good to hear. Glad to help.
If you stop back by, I am curious as to what upload cap you ended up at.
Enjoy
Steve
Whoa!
I really doubted this because it wasn't working..
first with the port then my speed test come out as 10.XXmB(not kB..)and then i forgot to let Vuze through the firewall..
after that it still didn't work..
until..
23kb/s shot up to 302kb/s!!!
even on my best days the speed only went up to 115kb/s.
Thanx for this nice guide^^
Great post. Appears as if this is doing the trick for me. I went from 45kb/s to 125kb/s on a large file I've been attempting to get. Thanks for the assist.
My only issue was with the Mainline DHT option. I received an error indicating my Java version does not mee the minimum requirements (1.6). I checked...Vuze shows 1.5 althought I've downloaded and installed 1.6 on my Mac (Ver. 10.5).
Can't figure out the rub there, but overall this has helped tremendously.
Thanks!
Great to hear on the speed.
As to the Mainline DHT, I may take that out of the article.
Apparently it is not being actively maintained and it looks like it was last worked on back in the 3 series of Vuze.
It always had issues with Mac. When first released it could not be used because Mac did not have 1.6.
I am thinking that maybe the Mac Java 1.6 came out when the plugin was not being maintained and they never adapted the plugin to the Mac 1.6.
Anyhow, I did not find it made much of a difference myself and had deleted it some time ago.
Steve
Update: Now 300 kb/s!! Fantastic.
1.3 MB/s!!!!! Who knew Vuze could fly like this?!
You obviously have a good ISP and a healthy torrent.
Funny how perceptions are. When bittorrent first came out, it was touted as a good way to transfer large files at high speeds. Because it used the bandwidth of many people, there was more bandwidth available than from a dedicated server.
Now, because most people have their bittorrent clients improperly set up, the perception is that torrent downloads are much slower than browser downloads.
It is a lot more fun with your speeds now.
Enjoy
Steve
good job, helped alot
i just went from having literally nothing to 320 kB/s. Your flippin awesome steve...great tutorial
I have also just followed the steps and wala, the download speed is about 3-4x faster :)
Good guide and thanks!
Working well so far. Unfortunately I can't find anything I want to download to TRULY test it. LOL. Anyhow, I will say it DID help another issue I had. I have that Magic Jack phone and whenever I used it while Azurus (Vuze) was running, the audio quality was ATROCIOUS! Anyhow, thanks again man... I appreciate you sharing with the masses :)
OhHH MEN i want to kiss you bro its 200kbps now @_@ Ohh +20 to you bro ^_^ before it was 25kbps and now its overloading Woott men i want to hug you bro
Men it works like heaven thanks bro
im download WOW FOR 25KB/S BUT NOW ITS 150KBS AWSOME GUIDE +10 TO YOU BRO
best guide and client ive used from today. Didnt care much for the old Azurus*? but anyways Vuze is working great man.
I agree, this guide is so easy to understand! Thanks, Gizmo's :)
Thanks a lot mate.....
That helped me out a lot! Thanks.
You guys are awsome thank you for your help : )
Thank's so much!
i have done everything you have said and by the way what a brilliant tutorial! I'm also using azureus turbo accelerator and my downloads are at around 120 kB/s to around 290 kB/s! Thank you
Thanks for the post man i was capped at 20 kB/s and so i hit all the way to 150 kB/s with nothing else running thanks.
Hello Sir. Steve Excellent job. I just spent a whole day trying to figure out the maximation process and finally when I was going out of my mind I ended up here. In 5 minutes I got 50% more juice for the legimate traffic.
Cant thank you enough. If you dont mind, I will pass this info forwards and promote this page gladly.
And If you have any more Advanced AzuGimmes up your sleeve the world would definetly not mind!
-Golden Geezer
All I can really say is thank you. This guide took my download average from 6.7 kB/s straight up to 55.4 kB/s. For everyone who said this didn't work, I hope you get it working eventually because it's a BIG boost. Thanks again
good job man u a graete guy to take time for this , respect from croatia !
Great site. Simple advice even I could follow. My download speed was 20x faster after following these steps.
Superb!!!
Wow this worked exceptionally! Indiana Jones wanted to finish downloading in 16 hours! As soon as I followed your instructions, it quickly went down to 1 hour! Oh so amazing. Thanks a lot.
Many thanks! it works and helps me a lot.
Excellent. Thanks for letting me know.
Steve
It worked well for me also. Increased down speed by 5 times or greater!