If you’ve used Bittorrent for some time, you might have encountered the annoyance of the torrent status indicator that perpetually stays yellow. What happens is you can’t quite connect cleanly to the torrent tracker thus the status indicator never turns green.
The upshot of this is that your download rates take a massive hit. I’ve been in numerous situations where seeders outnumbered peers by 6 to 1 yet I’d still be getting piddling download rates of 6kB/s on my 1Mbps/384kbps connection.
This was especially frustrating since it was initially not apparent to me why some trackers were okay while others were not.
It’s important to note there isn’t a single cause for this which means you can expect to get a lot of inapplicable advice when you ask around about this.
I initially suspected the problem was with my client (Bittornado) or my firewall (ZoneAlarm) but I now think it’s a combination of my ISP and some tracker configurations.
Some ISPs (including TM Net, my own) use a transparent proxy and this means the IP being reported to the tracker isn’t the actual client IP.
To check if this is true in your case, head over to the NatCheck site and determine whether the IP being reported is the same as the one in your connection details. If it’s different, your ISP is using a transparent proxy.
This ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem except some trackers disable NAT checking and are therefore unable to determine the actual client IP. Hence, that Perpetual Yellow Light of Wretched Download Rates.
(A transparent proxy can cause other problems as well. I currently can’t log in to Slashdot because TM Net’s transparent proxy IP address has been banned.)
Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any workaround on the client side. You could try requesting NAT checking be enabled on the tracker concerned but apart from that, the best thing to do is to simply exercise patience.
If you’re extremely lucky, you might occasionally establish a connection with a seed or a peer who can send you bits at a primo rate. Most of the time, though, you should expect your fat net pipe to be effectively reduced to dial-up speeds.
