I don't actually use BitTorrent, I just recommend it because other people seem to like it =] Finding torrents for me is always way too much of a hassle.
What plantagenet said re: emule... ed2k network can be a connection-intensive network, moreso than bittorrent - and by default emule also uses Kad, which uses an absolute killer number of connections (but improves searches dramatically, so it is said). The problem with this is that a lot (a -LOT-) of adsl modems and routers simply can't handle that number of connections. Also some firewalls (notably ZoneAlarm, Norton and McAfee also show documented problems, I use Kerio which isn't perfect either) and OS's (98-forget it, 2000-works, but not as well as XP - actually TCP is fine but the UDP side is ... intermittently dodgy) have their limits too.
Then there's the standard fare of port forwarding/opening to make sure you get a high ID, as some clients block low IDs completely, if they don't, they give low priority and also if you don't get UDP working you won't receive the benefits of throttling (without which your connection tends to die from too many uploads in your queue)...
Then after all that, you are expected to keep it running like, you know, all the time. They say if it's left off for more than an hour mid-download, that is a very bad thing.
Personally, after turning off Kad and going into the Advanced settings and turning down the max connections from 50 to 10 and spending some time trying to get my damn D-Link modem to forward my UDP packets (which turned out to be a hassle on Windows 2000 due to it being... well, random, basically)... I've had no problems at all =]
Except Kerio likes to kinda freeze my network traffic after say, about 8 hours of eMule use. My ICS gateway still works fine, though. Rebooting is the only thing that fixes that. It's weird.
What plantagenet said re: emule... ed2k network can be a connection-intensive network, moreso than bittorrent - and by default emule also uses Kad, which uses an absolute killer number of connections (but improves searches dramatically, so it is said). The problem with this is that a lot (a -LOT-) of adsl modems and routers simply can't handle that number of connections. Also some firewalls (notably ZoneAlarm, Norton and McAfee also show documented problems, I use Kerio which isn't perfect either) and OS's (98-forget it, 2000-works, but not as well as XP - actually TCP is fine but the UDP side is ... intermittently dodgy) have their limits too.
Then there's the standard fare of port forwarding/opening to make sure you get a high ID, as some clients block low IDs completely, if they don't, they give low priority and also if you don't get UDP working you won't receive the benefits of throttling (without which your connection tends to die from too many uploads in your queue)...
Then after all that, you are expected to keep it running like, you know, all the time. They say if it's left off for more than an hour mid-download, that is a very bad thing.
Personally, after turning off Kad and going into the Advanced settings and turning down the max connections from 50 to 10 and spending some time trying to get my damn D-Link modem to forward my UDP packets (which turned out to be a hassle on Windows 2000 due to it being... well, random, basically)... I've had no problems at all =]
Except Kerio likes to kinda freeze my network traffic after say, about 8 hours of eMule use. My ICS gateway still works fine, though. Rebooting is the only thing that fixes that. It's weird.