Speed Up BitTorrent

Wednesday, Jul. 21 2004 | Author: Scrivs

If you’ve ever used BitTorrent (Tomato Torrent client for Mac OS X) and were disappointed by the download speeds, try poking a hole through your firewall from 6881 to 6889. It quadrupled the speeds I was getting.

For those using the default Mac OS X firewall, you can edit the open ports in the “Sharing” section of the preferences and for those on Windows, check the ports section of your firewall application.

Besides this being cool, how much of a security threat does this now pose?

Category: Uncategorized

22 Responses for "Speed Up BitTorrent"

Jeff Minard

July 21st, 2004 at 3:16 pm
1

None? I don’t believe anything runs on those ports by default.
Jack

July 22nd, 2004 at 7:09 am
2

And doesn’t the Bittorrent readme tell you to do this anyway? I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t have worked that out for myself!
Funkatron

July 23rd, 2004 at 1:36 am
3

What I do anyway is set BT and my firewall to work at another, normally unknown port.
Max

July 25th, 2004 at 4:58 am
4

How do i set my firewall to another port? I use Norton 2004.
Les Brown

July 31st, 2004 at 1:33 pm
5

Here’s a guide to Bittorrent port forwarding for OS X and Apple Airport Extreme. Hope it helps.

http://www.blueskyis.com/bittorrent/airportforwarding.php
unwanted

December 8th, 2004 at 9:56 pm
6

i have symatec firewall and i have a wirelsess router and i have XP how to set the port to let things go through and can lower the upload speed
duff

April 3rd, 2005 at 10:21 am
7

i hve a binatone adsl 500 how i have tried doing all them things about default gateway ip but that page does not load ho do i maximise my downloads?
1s

May 7th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
8

well, max, u delete it.
Satanspet

June 22nd, 2005 at 5:10 pm
9

i use bittorrent and bittorrent accelerator pro, it gives u decent boosts by itself but i recomend opening up the ports also, i have done this on my Win XP machine and i went from something like 20 kbs to 110 kbs in mear seconds :) hope this helps
JD

June 24th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
10

How do i set the port to that on XP it doesnt have any port settings.
Blartibartfast

August 19th, 2005 at 12:42 am
11

If you have Windows firewall, you can just ports from the settings there.
Erik Hostetler

November 7th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
12

All my firewall, port forwarding, and address stuff seems to be right, I am getting green lights in Azureus, and a week ago I was downloading at up to 300k now I’m cruising between 10 and 30k…what’s gone wrong? How can I get the speed again? I’ve Comcast Cable Internet, running OS 10.4, and an Airport Express. Please Help…
bill macpherson

January 24th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
13

uh could you guys make this any more difficult to run???? I think not…Of coarse you could use more ambiguous termenology.Ive been to at least 20 sites trying to figure out how to speed up the downloads…Maybe in plain english cuz I guess you have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out…Apart from that I love the concept whole albums split into files etc…
mike

March 3rd, 2006 at 10:47 pm
14

I’m in college on the college network, we’re hard wired no wireless. How would I go about speeding mine up on mac osx?
razor

April 19th, 2006 at 2:58 am
15

i have Kerio Personal Firewall 4 on WinXP Pro
How do I open up the ports 6881 - 6889
on my system
KDE

April 27th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
16

mike: Alot of the time you will find Bittorrent ports blocked in school/college networks.
kamui

May 23rd, 2006 at 9:29 pm
17

how do I open up the ports, I’m new at this, sry!~
HEX

June 3rd, 2006 at 7:11 pm
18

this site helped me out….i was running at 3kbs after opening ports it runs at 90kbs….go to http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/2005/04/24/how-to-configure-your-router-to-allow-fast-bittorrent-downloads/
Johs

September 25th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
19

Hi i have got onto my firewall on windows XP and have the Choice to Pick General Exceptions or Advanced.What shud I do plesase help as I am currently running at 13KB/s :Hi i have got onto my firewall on windows XP and have the Choice to Pick General Exceptions or Advanced.What shud I do plesase help as I am currently running at 13KB/s :<
Tellahoohoo

January 25th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
20

I’m use bittorrent on a belkin pre-n1 mimo wireless router.

The thing that did the trick for me was going to the router config page 198.168.2.1 and going under firewall>Virtual Servers using ports 6881-6889 I had to do it on both fields for TCP & UDP since theres no single option for both. After entering my personal IP address and applying the changes i went from an average of .3 - 2.5 all the way upto 110 - 143(highest i’ve hit)

If your on a linksys I think this feature is port forwarding…

Happy Downloading
Tellahoohoo

January 26th, 2007 at 12:00 am
21

after i changed the settings my seed & peers leeped up from 1 or 2 to currently 24 and i’m hitting speeds of over 200 kib/s

you just have to configur the router

and my port on bit torrent is 6886 i’ll try to mess w/ each one to see which provides the best speeds and let everyone know.
Giannis Amanopoulos

February 19th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
22

Yeah, but a lot of viruses and other malware/malicious applications could start scanning that range knowing that there are an increasingly large number of users who have those open.

A good analogy would be to put a fence around your house, and then open a little bit up in the back… eventually, somehow, someway someone is going to get in.