How To Increase your Torrent download rates by 207%

One of the biggest questions while staring at that Download speed in Vuze (Azurues) is how can I make download go faster? Idea is that on well seeded torrents, it should be possible to download at full speed of your Internet connection and then just seed back afterwards to give a good ratio back to community.

Where’s the problem? Well, it turns out that network topology of Internet is a bit funny and that we often send parts of files to computers on other side of world, making this a very inefficient protocol. The reason for this is that further away is other peer, more errors happen, making it up to 30% data-loss on average in the process because parts of files need to be resent. This is of course seen in your download speeds.

How to solve this? The obvious solution to this problem is to send and receive more data from computers that are closer to you from network perspective. It’s not the geography that matters but the way the network is built.

Lucky for us, the team AquaLab built a free add-on for Vuze. It’s called Ono plugin for Vuze, and it does all these peer optimizations for you in background. They promise incredible speed-ups:

Does this really improve download performance? In a word, yes. Using results collected from our participating users (well over 100,000 of them!), we have found that our system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%).

I’ve been running the plugin now for a few days and I can second their findings. It seems that I’m getting faster download speeds on average. Give it a try, it’s a free improvement so you have nothing to loose, you’ll just download a bit faster.