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However, you will get better speeds if you allow incoming connections as well.

IANABTExpert, but I think that's because you'd otherwise only be able to upload to hosts that you'd previously contacted to request downloads, and BT penalizes you for the (relatively) bad connectivity. Does anyone now if that's the case?

It's interesting to see bittorrent working on such a large scale type of thing. Notice that the webserver hosting the .torrent files have gone down, and as of now 1338 (darn it I'm # 1338) people are downloading it sucessfully. While it is true that it is going to take me 2 hours to get it all, I remember the days of old 56k modems when a 200mb download would take 2 days, so this is fast enough for me.

For those of you going slower then about 30K down, make sure you have holes poked in your firewalls.

Also, for the rest of us, leave the thing running for a while after you finish getting it please, it 's sad to see the number of seeders drop as quickly as they are....

I believe that you're a leach untill you become a seed. A seed is "A computer that has a complete copy of a certain torrent."

http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/23.html explains what a seed/leach is best:

A peer is another computer on the internet that you connect to and transfer data. Generally a peer does not have the complete file, otherwise it would be called a seed. Some people also refer to peers as leeches, to distinguish them from those generous folks who have completed their download and continue to leave the client running and act as a seed.

Leaching in the sense as you understood it is indeed not very feasible.

Alternatively you could just correctly configure your router/firewall for use with bittorrent. Here's How

Bittorrent downloads get faster when you allow others to upload. So you do need to punch some controlled holes in your firewall to make it work.

I allow ports 6881 - 6889 back through my firewall to my local computer, allowing up to 9 other bittorrent clients to connect back to me for uploads. Unfortunately I have yet to find a firewall which understands the bittorrent protocol enough to actually create these ports on the fly (with sufficient IP-based access controls).

http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/25.html explains this in a bit more detail.

Rich.

Have you been living under a rock? The solution is BitTorrent!

When I first used Bittorrent on my Win2k box, it crashed the machine repeatedly. Turns out it was a buggy NIC driver; downloading a new version from the chip vendor (rather than Linksys, the card vendor) fixed the problem. BitTorrent was the only app to cause the crash (I guess it really taxes the network driver), but it WAS a driver problem.

On the off chance you are having a similar problem, here's a link to the problem description and solutions.