Internet is slow when downloading one file

This is worth considering especially if there are several people in your home that needs to be online. The download limit of the network connection is vital to the speed of the download too. Depending on your network provider, there are certain download speed limits that are set in place.

It is important that you are aware of these limitations. Just because your internet connection is fast, it does not mean that the download speed is fast, too. Once you know the download speed limit of your computer, try to regulate your download activity accordingly. If the cap is low, stick to downloading one file at a time.

The computer itself can be the cause behind a slow download. This happens when it is unable to read its processes quickly. In particular, the Windows registry can be corrupted or may contain many unnecessary files.

The computer has to read all of these files before processing the actual download. To fix this problem, you need to clean the Windows registry on a regular basis. A virus infection can cause a lot of damage. It can also cause downloads to run slow. Viruses, in general, can result in slow performance. When you suspect that malware might be causing the problem, you need to perform a scan.

Once you get rid of the harmful program, you should see an immediate improvement in download speed. Therefore, you need to check if you are using too many files or opening too many programs while also downloading or streaming.

This is because opening too many files or programs uses up processing memory that could be utilized for the download. Green is good, yellow shows issues, red is bad. If you really want to draw doing it manually, you can follow the guides from PortForward. Most torrent clients have built-in encryption. This lite-weight obfuscation not unbreakable like a VPN is designed to fool simple throttling algorithms. This limits your peer availability and thus your speeds. This article tackled all the most common causes of slow torrents.

Plug your computer directly into your modem and see if that makes a difference. Make sure to leave any questions in the comments below and let us know how these tips worked out for you! David started torrenting before it was cool. He enjoys hiking, strategy games and eats watermelon year round.

He still rocks his Napster t-shirt once a month. Thank man, I applied the torrent setting you have posted and my utorrent download speed just rocketed. Thanks again. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

David Barnes. What causes slow torrents? Slow torrent downloads are commonly caused by a few factors. In North America — In Europe — This report found This is commonly used on high-bandwidth data streams, such as: Torrents Skype Netflix Youtube If you ever wondered by your youtube videos are constantly buffering or running in low resolution even though your connection is 10mpbs or faster, the answer is simple. The easy way to make your torrents faster A significant percentage of torrent users will see a speed boost after signing up for a fast VPN service.

Make sure you're calculating speeds correcly. So even if it has a high theoretical maximum speed or bandwidth allowance, if lots of people are using that service at the same time, then each person will get lower speeds, even if the overall available bandwidth is high. The simplest way around this is to wait until the home network is quieter before downloading large files. It is normally reserved for gamers to reduce lag or ping on busy networks, but there is nothing stopping other people using it to prioritize their devices instead.

The idea here is that you are instructing your router to process the traffics demands of your device first, before anything else on the home network. In reality, this is more effective at reducing latency for devices like games console, and helping out streamers. However, it may also deliver higher download speeds on busy networks if that is what you are looking for.

DNS Servers translate domain names into IP addresses — they basically allow you to access sites by typing it their name rather than a more difficult to remember IP address. They are normally automatically assigned by your ISP, and most of the time they work pretty well, but occasionally they can be slow or have technical difficulties, and it can be a good idea to manually change them to custom ones to get better speeds.

This is the settings screen you should get to on Windows systems to change DNS servers manually — see this video if you prefer a visual demonstration of how to do it. The specific settings and menus differ slightly with each operating system; see here for a full list of how to change DNS settings for each operating system. Being such a big company Google DNS servers usually also work very well and reliably as they have servers in lots of locations, so it can sometimes deliver better speeds to use them.

Also there are a couple of other free DNS service providers which take a more privacy conscious approach to their services, keeping little or no logs of user history. We list them below:. The general idea with this would be to test your speeds using the default DNS servers, and then switch to a manual pair Google DNS are a good bet to see if your speeds are better.

See our article on DNS for gaming for more on this. This could be anything from overloaded servers to technical issues that simply slow down the speeds available at any given time. It can even also happen that submarine cables that connect the internet between countries and continents get damaged , and this can slow down the internet in certain parts of the world. The acid test on this is as mentioned above — plug any suitable device you have into the router directly with a cable and check your speeds using speedtest.

Obviously, we have less control of this, but there are services that can track the current status of ISP services in your country. Word of outages and problems also spreads rapidly on social media these days.

The Downdetector service is great to check the status of your current service. Check for your country:.