the forums at degreez.net

"Your download rate is proportional to your upload rate". So if I was to limit uploading to 8kbs, how fast would it let me download? Or is it worked out differently than that? Any info is welcomed, thanks!

Also, what are the basics of port forwarding? I managed to get it all working by my self (which I am quite chuffed about cos I?m not incredibly computer literate). I don?t really understand why forwarding ports makes things run more smoothly. I would have thought (obviously wrongly) that it would either all work at 100% speed, or just not work at all. Umm...yeah, thanks again.

Think about what happens when 2 peers that don't have their ports forwarded try to connect to each other......The connection won't happen and the peers that can't connect to each other lose each other as an additional source for the file. If one of those peers happens to be you, and the other one happens to be someone behind a VERY fast upstream that is firewalled and they aren't allowed to open ports or they just never opened their bittorrent ports at all, you wouldn't be able to get anything from them since you can't connect to them and they can't connect to you. Meanwhile, someone who properly forwarded their ports, would get that untapped speed since the person behind a fast link who didn't or couldn't forward their ports could connect out to someone who did and then they would be giving the people they were able to connect out their upstream that you would completely miss out on.

Bittorrent uses an algorithm to upload to those peers which it had the best download rates from, so you can say that your download rate will be proportional to your upload rate. But it also uploads to random peers, so even with bad upload you will still be able to download.

Why is being firewalled bad?