running bittorrent and utorrent together

Question

I want to migrate to uTorrent however I've got some files running in bittorrent so basically I'm having both bittorrennt and uTorrent running now.

1) I was wondering will we have any problems running bittorrent alongside uTorrent ?

2) If not, then in the future wouldn't it be more beneficial to segregate my downloads into "2 packs" such that some is in uTorrent and some is in Bittorrent so that they would be faster this way since ultimately now I'm using 2 ports instead of 1 and I have access to the peers that are running Bittorrent + the peers that are running uTorrent?

Answer 1

1. No. (There are situations in which they could conflict, but they're unlikely.)

2. No and no. How many ports you use doesn't affect how fast you can download which is the primary limit on how fast you get files.

   "BitTorrent" can refer to either a protocol for downloading files or the original software that used that protocol.[1] Both μTorrent and the BitTorrent program use the same BitTorrent protocol and will download files from any other program that does. You don't need to use the same software as someone else as long as you're both using BitTorrent protocol software.

Answer 2

I ran out of room in the comment…

grawity: It matters very little how many peers you access, and it doesn't matter at all how many ports you use. Ports are simply connection markers; the real speed limit comes from your hardware and your ISP's plan.

Pacerier: @grawity could youj explain why it matters very little how many peers we have access to?

If your software and/or hardware and/or ISP limit the number of connections, then it won’t make a difference if there are more peers than you can connect to.

Look at the peers and seeds numbers in the clients. They will usually be of the form x (y) , where x=number of clients you are connected to and y=number of clients in that swarm. Usually, you will find that x < y.

The number of peers matters only insofar as the availability of the torrent (more peers and/or seeds means more sources which generally means faster transfer, but only up to your limit). It has little bearing if for example one or two peers are maxing out your Internet connection speed or you are already connected to the maximum number your software/hardware/connection support.

You can adjust the number of connections in the torrent client’s settings, but setting it too high will only cause problems because your operating system has it’s own limits (vis XP SP2), as does your hardware (for example, consumer-grade routers can crash when overloaded with connections), and of course your ISP can (does?) slap a hard absolute limit on the number of connections you can have, not to mention using it as a P2P detection heuristic to start throttling and so on.