BitTorrent running slow, peer discrepancy

[emiko]

Hi all. I've been using torrents for years but have never really learned more than the basic usage and terminology. My d/l speeds are usually between 2 and 20 KB/s and I've never seen them higher than about 50 KB/s.

What confuses me is when I click the Info button on a torrent, under the "Torrent" tab it will say:

Total tracker peers: 46 (34 seeds)

However, in the top half of the info window, on the right side, it says:

Peers: 8 (all seeds)

And the "Peer List" tab reflect this, only showing 8 peers. My question is, where are those other 38 peers? Wouldn't my downloads be going faster if could get connected to the rest of the swarm?

Secondly, of those 8 seeds, I'm only downloading from 2-3 at a time. There are others in the list who have the complete file but I'm not downloading from them.

Also, I've seen the patch for XP sp2 a while back that allows you to hack your max half-open tcp connections, but I'm running Vista. Is there a patch available for Vista, or does Vista make this unnecessary? Although unless Vista has set the max connections to 3 then my client isn't even maxing out my connections as is.

Thanks in advance!

[Vladd44]

Router? And if so Port forwarded?

[emiko]

Yes and yes, and I changed it away from the 6881 that it defaulted to in case my ISP was blocking.

[Love]

I notice yr isp is Comcast Emiko and Comcast is one of the isps that actually cap their users' bandwidths. I know for certain that they do cap their users' winmx transfer speeds and maybe yr slow BT transfer rates have more to do with yr isp capping u than anything else. If u can download and upload successfully (regardless on BT or winmx), yr ports r already open and yr router and firewall r not the culprits. The culprit of yr slow speed is most likely yr isp. U probably need to live with this until u choose to change isp.