Slow Abc

[short360uk]

been using abc 2.6 for a few months now (its the only torrnent client ive used) my internet speed is 600k cable modem i never seem to got downloads any faster then 55kbps i have my uploads set to 8 kbps if i set them any higher it really slows down the download speed. should i be getting faster downloads than this or is this correct, or is there a better torrent client i can use with faster downloads?

[Switeck]

"600k cable modem" actually means 600 kilobits/sec MAX DOWNLOAD SPEED.
Your upload max speed may well be 128 kilobits/sec or less!

Speeds of 55 "kbps" down and 8 "kbps" up in BitTorrent are actually KiloBYTES/sec. It takes at least 8 kilobits/sec of REAL bandwidth to download at 1 KiloBYTE/sec -- so 55 KiloBYTE/sec would need at least 440 kilobits/sec of bandwidth from your cablemodem not counting TCP/ip overheads, BitTorrent overheads, and latency problems with the uploaders to you.

In short, if you're NOT firewalled according to BitTorrent, that's about as fast as you're going to go irregardless of what BitTorrent client you use.

Is there anything else on your connection eating your bandwidth?
Have you run a bandwidth monitoring program (AnalogX is what I use) to make sure that when the internet connection seems "idle" that it really is idle?