the forums at degreez.net

yeah my bittorents download rate is alway below 20kbs.i routed my firewall to open certain ports like the faqs says.anyway i m new to this so can someone help.i have verizon dsl and a new computer so it not slow.im guessing it has some thing to do with the settings in bittorrent i dont quite understand the whole upload rate(i got it at 13) and max uploads(got it at 4).i seem to have 7peers and 3 seeds and its STILL downloading at 21KBS.hhhhhheeeeeelllpp.......

There're heaps of threads on here already about this but anyway. What colour light are you seeing? If it's not green then you haven't succeeded in opening up the ports on your firewall. If it is green then I'd say you're upload rate is set too high and is flooded.
What speed is your connection? The 80% rule (ie. setting your upload limit to 80% of your total upload speed) has to be applied to the actual speed you're getting on you line, not the ISP quoted speed. So for instance I have a 512/128 ADSL line. Theoretically I should get 16KB/s upload, so 80% of that would be 13KB/s. However I don't get 16KB/s, I get closer to 12 or 13KB/s, so I need to set my limit to 80% of THAT, which is 10KB/s.
Also don't expect to see full speeds until you've been downloading from the current torrent for a while. If you have no or very few pieces of the torrent to share your speeds will tend to be much lower...

Forgot to log in....

I meant to add to that, the upload limit obviously has to apply over all the torrents you are currently downloading. ie. If you have two torrents downloading and set them both to 10Kb/s you're going to end up flooding the upload again. You'll either have to set them to 5KB/s each, or use something like NetLimiter to limit your overall upload speed to 10KB/s...