Torrent Throttling

[kirkish]

Hi All. I know that there are multiple posts on this subject that imply that BT don't throttle torrents but from my recent experience, something is certainly happening and I cannot for the life of me figure it out. 

Basically, trying to pull (legitimate) files via BitTorrent. Download speeds start off very fast, almost maxing out my line speed and after a couple of minutes gradually slow down until they hit zero. If I pause the torrent, wait a few minutes and then restart I get exactly the same behaviour. Happens on different torrent files with identical behaviour. Peer counts are all high.

Only seems to have been the case since a switch from Vodafone to BT. I'm hardwired in to back of the Home Hub.

Would love to know if others are seeing similar behaviour.

[NigelB72]

BT don't throttle anything so you might want to check your settings within your Torrent client. Bare in mind that the person or people seeding could have set an upload limit so they're not using up all their bandwidth

[TimCurtis]

@kirkish 

I have no issues at all with torrent file downloads nearly always maxing my bandwidth (46meg).

The only issue I ever had was with the HDD not keeping up and pausing whilst the cache was written to the drive. That disappeared when I used an SSD instead.

Do you use a VPN or different DNS servers like googles rather than BT's?

How's your PC/laptop connected to the Hub?

[-Richie-]

The nature of bittorrent would always favour the fastest uploader to help get more seeds, the more you upload the more chance you have of connecting to a seed, otherwise you're getting parts from other peers, which slows things down as it stops/starts to connect with the rest of the swarm.

Bittorrent the protocol isn't blocked or throttled by BT though.

[kirkish · Accepted solution]

Thanks for all of the replies. Seems like I've found the culprit and it was the client. Having tried a VPN (ExpressVPN) I saw exactly the same behaviour, regardless of where in the world I was connected so this really did rule out the BT connection. So, I tried switching to a different client and boom, full speed downloads. Was using BitTorrent Web and have moved to BitLord and all seems to be to be fine now. Double-checked all the settings on the old client and nothing was set to throttle or anything, so no idea what was going on. 

But, it is solved now. Thanks for the replies all!