Vuze Blog

Last week, Ernesto from Torrent Freak asked us a question, “What are your top tips for optimizing download speed?” so our co-founder and CTO, Olivier Chalouhi set to responding. Seems to me that as many people as possible should profit from his wise words, so here they are:

1. Seed. Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.
2. Be connectable. Make sure you’re not fire-walled by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.
3. Manage your upload speed. It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.
4. Select the right torrents. Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.
5. Be realistic. Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.
6. Get a Friend Boost. I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed. When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

Happy downloading.

Some of you have already discovered our new search functionality, but for those of you that haven’t, we want to make sure you don’t miss out on this great new feature.

Now, when you type the name of the video you’re looking for into our search box, you’ll get a list of all the torrents from the Vuze Network and from some of the most popular other sites. If you can’t see the name of your favorite site, you can always search for templates that have been created by members of our community and add it. And for the developers / hackers out there, you can always create your own custom template too, and share it with others on the web.

We’d love to know what you think of this new feature, so please leave your comments here or in our forums.

Happy Finding,

Olivier

If you think there have been a few changes around here lately, you’re right. We’ve been busy in Palo Alto. We thought we’d take the time to tell you a bit about why we made these changes, what they are (in case you haven’t spotted them all), and what other changes are on the horizon.

We have a big vision here at Vuze. We don’t want to be just the bittorrent application you came to love. Rather, we want to create the best all-in-one application for finding, playing and sharing great content, especially the high-quality content you’ll discover on the Vuze Network.

Finding torrents: Improved search

We want you to be able to discover great content wherever it lives on the web. Our new search engine lets you search for content on Vuze, as well as sources outside Vuze. Try a search and see what we mean.

Sharing torrents: new Friends feature

Everyone likes to share stuff with their friends. Well, now we’ve made it really easy to share your favorite torrents with friends. All you have to do is to become Friends on Vuze and then you can share any torrent with them, without ever leaving the application. If they’re a good friend, they’ll share what they find with you, too.

Get a Boost

And, you get another added bonus when you create a group of friends on Vuze. Your friends automatically become your own personal swarm where you give each other preferential access to each other’s bandwidth and make downloading faster. It’s what we call a “Friend Boost”. So, the more friends you have, the faster it is to download. So boost and get boosted.

Try out all our new features, leave us comments here or in our forums telling us what you think and what you’d love to see in future releases. If you are curious about what other people think, you can also check out these articles from ZeroPaid, NewTeeVee, Slyck and TorrentFreak. And remember, these changes are only the first step. We have more upgrades in store, so stay tuned.

Gilles and the Vuze Team