“Why isn’t BitTorrent faster?”, he asked.

I have a Mac OS X and I run bits for wheels. I am confused on how to,"change ports" and stuff to make it download faster can anyone help?

I'm really liking Bits on Wheels, Mac OS X Native, shows all the same info as Azureus, plus you get a cool 3D swarm view that I have not seen anywhere else. Fixing the ports on your router (or making you machine DMZ) will speed a lot of things up, as will setting your BT client's upload bandwith to half of your available upload bandwith. My cable is 4.5down/384up, so setting my global max upload to 15k/sec improves my download speeds immensly over the full 35~k/sec. Grabbed a 1.3gb file last night and averaged around 230k/sec. You can also play with the number of clients you connect to and how many you upload to at once. -BlackFly-

I totally agree with D. Java applications in macos tend to cludge the machine quite heavily. To the point of having to quit the application and restart it to regain a little control on my powerbook. The more file your trying to download the heavier the problem. Beside that azureus is just amazing: downloads aren't always super-quick, especially for not-so-common files, but at least they work consistently (as opposed to xnap, where you have to wait FOREVER on queue and then still download very slowly) and it has a slew of nice options to play with. A great piece of software. And, like icing on a cake, it even comes with a GPL license (and considering the price people asks even for ridiculous software on the mac it's a VERY nice plus)!!! Regards Marcello

ick, azureus never works for me. Bits on Wheels (http://www.bitsonwheels.com/) seems to be much better as a mac app, but i still prefer the python client.

I've been using Azureus for nearly a year now, and I have to say it's the best Mac BT client I've used. I still run into problems though. Some torrents, even though I'm connected to plenty of seeds and peers will trickle down onto my hard drive. Others come screaming down the pipe (if our DSL's paltry 50-80 kps can be called "screaming"-it certainly doesn't compare with our old cable connection). It seems random which torrents will go quickly and which ones will drag their heels. I've changed ports and made sure they're open on the firewall. I've even gone so far as to put my iBook in my router's DMZ, but to no avail. Does anyone have any thoughts?

It's also worth noting that many ISPs throttle known P2P ports. Once I set my BitTorrent client (the official OSX version is what I'm using) to use a different range of ports than the default, I got much better speeds. You can't do this on Tomato, BTW. And as for Azureus, it's neat but I stopped using it since it seemed so slow and kludgy - as do most java apps on OSX.

The real issue is that he COULDN'T download it faster via FTP since if he and everyone else was hitting the same FTP server it'd be even slower.

I like azureus alot as well. It gives me so many options and really keeps me informed. Some of the information gets me worked up though, like when my peers are not connectable. That is such a selfish thing to me. The very essence of the endeavor is that everyone helps everyone.