Half-Open Patcher Speeds Up BitTorrent Downloads

I dunno....Vuze does a pretty good job of making my torrents come in pretty fast, I'm not really that excited about anything that's going to "patch a critical system file". But that's just me.

I'm skeptical. Anyone have some good results?

logie

@wboswell: I agree. If it is to protect me from viruses and worms, then I wouldn't want to do it.

wakebordr

I did that manually on my old pc, and I can't say I really noticed a difference. Most downloads are limited by the seeders, not windows settings.

Ben Kreiter

@lankysob: HAH.

My connection moves pretty swiftly currently. I'm worried if this does what it claims to that I'll hit Comcast's 250GB limit even faster (not that I think I ever will).

@wakebordr : not like having lower open connection limit will save you from worms ;)
and yes it works and keeps P2P flowing well (if you're using it, that is)

MadEvil

@PatrickReddy: Sorry, my 2 TB constantly cycling media laughed, using me as a mouthpiece.

@wboswell: Be careful with it, tcpip.sys is not just critical, it's vital.

If it's damaged, your system won't boot in safe mode with networking off, even.

@logie: 15kb/s and no internet connection (would always time out), to 500kb/s and no noticeable drop in connection (Ping and such still suffers), so yeah. Good results.

@Jack Doyle: So does windows, as evidenced by this article. It might not be very happy about it, but it won't stop you.

Go on, then, tell me one thing I can do in !Windows that I can't do in Windows, which is in any way important to me as a user. (IE, no kernel rubbish)

I'm wondering, does this work on vista x64 ? Vista has a rather awkward way to force this via signed drivers/system files and BSoDs if you just modifie the tcpip.sys :P

Enorym

"Did you realize Windows only allows 10 outbound connection attempts at a time?"

Or you could just use Linux or Mac OS that lets you decide what you actually want to do for the most part.

Jack Doyle

@nasa geek: scratch that, there's even an option for restoring to your backup within the program.

@logie: I didn't use this specific patcher, but I did patch my tcip.sys using a command line patcher. It certainly doesn't hurt, but if you get good speeds anyways, you really need it. However you could just make a backup and if the patcher doesn't increase your speeds, just delete the patched one and use the backup you made.

@lankysob: 250GB a month?

That'd last about 3 weeks. Damnit :D

@logie:

I used to hit the limit constantly.

/you will see error messages in the event manager saying that the TCP/IP limit for half open connections has been reached.

/increasing this limit does not make you more vulnerable to worms/viruses. It just increases the number of connections you can make.

The original intent was to limit the spread of worms by slowing down how many connections a worm could make from an infected system to other systems (but it doesn't do that very well).

IE having that setting set low is of no benefit at all to you. It's supposed to keep your machine from being able to infect a bunch of other machines quickly.

@Enorym: Vista x86, yes, last I checked x64 had some sort of convoluted workaround.

@Phoshi: Wow is there any mode you can boot into... I guess you could back it up and make a PE disk (can read/write to NTFS) and THEN make the changes and if there is any trouble just copy the backup...
Then again this won't help me... because all the torrents I try are listed as healthy and yet there is never any seeders :(. Bittorent blows! for me (except Xubuntu iso that worked ).

I'd really like to get this up & running, too bad a message popped up from Rogers, my ISP. (not a popup add, it was from Rogers)saying I've used 45 of my 60 gigs already.

Tsylord

Is this the EventID 4226 patch?

_Jonny

i did this some time ago manually for my desktop/BitTorrent mule. I wish i had this program then XD

@_Jonny: Yes.

ras07

@lankysob: You're still on Comcast?

Shashank Agarwal

Downloading torrents on Windows is impossible with this.

@Phoshi: How about mounting remote drives on a user specified directory (using sshfs)? Samba works, but needs a lot of configuration, whereas SSHFS works out of box. Dokan gives a lot of headache as well. In the other direction, mounting a Windows drive on a remote computer.

Shashank Agarwal

I've patched my systems in a number of different ways (with no ill effects), but this is by far the easiest.

Some other notes:

- You can check your event log (Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Event Viewer, then System events) and look for event number 4226. If you have a whole ton of these events, you definitely need this patch. If you have none, or very few, you probably don't need to worry about it.

- Occasionally a Microsoft patch or system update will overwrite TCPIP.SYS and thus reset the open connection limit, so you should recheck it from time to time.

ras07

@Tsylord: It won't increase your usage, per se, it'll speed it up. So if you're a particularly stingy seeder, you'll use less :D

And next month, seed properly.

@PatrickTulskie: without*

@Shashank Agarwal: "important to me as a user." - I don't run a server, if I did, it'd be *nix.

@dmtofree: Yeah, a recovery CD or anything can recover you, as can system restore, but still... it's a bitch :D

@Phoshi: Ah well, I don't know your needs, but I'm a user as well, and I'd be happy to get out of the loop of syncing my files. I don't run a server either, but some real big files that I process are stored on the server!

Shashank Agarwal

@ras07: ... "indicates that x64 is supported", that is. (+1 for comment editing, pls)

ras07

@[half-open.com] indicates that x64. There's nothing x64-specific in the FAQ. (I haven't tried patching an x64 system myself.)

ras07

@Phoshi: Package manager.

To make this work in uTorrent you need to go to Preferences->Advanced and change net.max_halfopen to ~90% of the number you choose here. You could put it up to 100 but that may be detrimental to your internet browsing while torrenting. Personally I have mine patched to 50 (which is the default for the command-line patcher), so this value is 45 in my uTorrent preferences.

ca_aok

@Jack Doyle: wow. who saw THAT coming?

quidpro

The "critical system file" is tcpip.sys and was limited to 10 after the blaster worm fiasco which allowed the worm to make hundreds of half open connections and blast networks with itself. The patch was originally made several years ago by lvllord and there is a caveat for vista x64 users. Vista x64 uses a mandatory driver signing check at bootup, THIS PATCH WILL RENDER YOUR SYSTEM UNABLE TO BOOT IF YOU RUN VISTA X64.
The remedy is to hit F8 during bootup for advance options and choose Disable Driver Signature Enforcement. However this option will need to be selected each and every time you boot up unless you use the program readydriver plus (google around for instructions)

XP 32/64 and Vista 32 all work fine with this patch.

syko21

@Senethior459: add/remove programs.

Yeah, I'm joking, you win this round :)

@wboswell: I've used patches like this ever since I started using Windows XP. I've never had it screw up once. As for getting infected by worms its going to happen if it is possible.

Pho3nix1991

real men use bitcomet, which contains a half-open script

Y'all aren't comprehending here for the most part. This utility helps overcome a setting hard-coded into windows to protect others from YOUR machine if it gets infected.

The typical Windows user mindset shows here though.

5h17h34d

@Phoshi:

I'm not trying to troll, just saying that I can ssh into a broken box and fix it without having to reboot.

I can mount any folder on my desktop to any other *nix computer in my house with a standard SSH server (granted, that's just one -- my *nix media center).

I can change window managers. That's huge for me. I have a quad-core with 2GiB of memory. I could easily run KDE4, but I choose instead to run a minimalist Fluxbox with *everything* bound to the keyboard. The lack of WM choice in Windows is bleh.

As stated before, package managers are a huge plus in Linux. "sudo pacman -Syu" and all my software is up to date.

Now, obviously, there are somethings Windows can do that Linux can't... like:

Play new games. I have to reboot to my Windows partition.

That's about it that I can think of. Everything else I can run in WINE, and the few things I can't run in WINE can run in my Virtual Machine (I don't know if that counts or not :p).

I'm not trying to troll, just showing a viewpoint.

FreeChaos

@5h17h34d: lemmie guess. Linux user.

the limit is no protection. it was a half assed hack in the first place.
the only protection is to practice safe computing in the first place.

KhaiJB

@5h17h34d:
I'm pretty sure that most windows users that frequent this site should be able to fix their system before it causes others harm.

Failureman

[thatstupidclub.com]

FTA:
I still see this bandied about as a possible factor in slow P2P speeds. It is easily misunderstood, but the half open connections limit imposed by XP SP2 and Vista does not matter for P2P speeds. It limits the rate at which connections can be made, not the total number of simultaneous connections.

Now, 10 half open connections seem a little low, but most ordinary users do not need more than this. Even heavy P2P users such as myself.

Perseco

@5h17h34d: Last time I checked, I can delete tcpip.sys in XP without even using an admin account. I could write a virus to change the value just fine - it's no protection at all. Typical non-windows viewpoint: All Windows users are morons who are infested with viruses?

Not going to say that, I don't generalise.

@lazaroff: Same real men who shoot themselves in the foot for fun?

@Perseco: It certainly does!
With 10, your torrents CAN get up to a good speed, but it'll take a while, with 100, it'll take much less time, and doesn't impair your browsing.

That's like saying surface doesn't effect car speed - maybe not directly, in the engine, but it still does.

@ras07: You can't really check that event if you use a torrent program that artificially limits the number of half-open connections. For example, uTorrent's default value is set at 8, so you should never see this in your system log if you run uTorrent with the default settings.

Raise that limit in the settings and then check. ;)

KStrike155

@syko21: Good job spreading lies. This is not the case anymore, have a good day.

polobunny

@ras07: Works wonderfully, I have done it on a system not long ago. The workaround isn't needed anymore, Windows does not fall into test mode or anything of the sort anymore.

polobunny

@Pho3nix1991: Ditto. It's not going to make you more prone to getting infected by worms, it's going to make it propagate faster to the others you connect to.
Half-open TCP connections limits as a whole are a joke.

polobunny

@Phoshi:

Oh, another thing Windows can do that Linux can't is the whole middle click and drag so that it scrolls thing. I really miss that in Linux and I have no idea why nobody has implemented it yet.

Also, Vista can have individual sound control (Eg. 10% for one app, mute another, etc.). Why hasn't Linux figured this out? That's a really nice feature I wish we had.

FreeChaos

@quidpro: There should be some kind of law, much like Godwin's Law, describing how far into a discussion on anything OS related some troll is going show up.

@PatrickTulskie: Utterly false.

Piaculum

lol just DLed this to find out my XP Pro is already set to 50,000 ...... hmmmmmmm

Grem135

DSLReports says:
"WINDOWS VISTA USERS: Vista TCP tuning (tweaking) is NOT advisable. The Vista TCP stack does a reasonable job of tuning the receive window dynamically, there are no known registry tweaks that would optimize Vista better than its default configuration."
-Taken from [www.dslreports.com]

So I guess this hack would be useless, right?

@anwas.adienwc: 2nd post. If not earlier.

@FreeChaos: Having said that, middle click paste -is- delicious.

When I take the time to check in utorrent it usually shows around 40-45 half-open connections since patching it. I noticed a pretty significant increase in upload speeds but not so much downstream.
Quite a few paranoid people out there worried about a simple value change in a system file. Scary stuff.

@APer3Caper: Check the first post replies, I've seen massive benefits.

@lazaroff: Real men use private trackers where clients like BitComet are banned. And this isn't specifically a client problem, though most clients need to be tweaked as well to take advantage of increased halfopen slots.

ca_aok

@wakebordr : It isn't to protect YOU from viruses. It's to protect OTHERS from getting viruses you have. :P

ssj4Gogeta

@polobunny: tell that to the BSOD on my vista machine

syko21

@FreeChaos: Actually, you can middle click scroll on Linux for Firefox. Type about:config in your address bar and change general.autoScroll to true.

Things I like about Windows, looks good, is fairly stable, runs Office, Flash runs pretty well (especially compared to Linux). There are always programs or hacks to take care of most of the things, like Putty for SSH. I just hope there was a way to mount remote drives. Wish list for Windows 7?!?

Shashank Agarwal

Has anyone tried this with Windows 7?

Teddy Toggweiler

instead of running a potentially malware .exe or .msi, how about you lazy jerks at lifehacker just give us the registry key or binary hack.

sooner or later, lifehacker, you're going to promote a "utility" that is malicious, and then you're going to get your deep-pockets pants sued off.

you're a valuable daily read, lifehacker, but i'd never blindly trust your to run potential spyware/malware/viruses. it's a question of when, not if.

LesterGaze

this utility is pretty good! equally for geeks and lamers! i have 3-4 downloaders running simultaneously which includes download accelerators and torrent clients. that sum -up to around 50 above outbound connections sometimes! when i have set the bandwitdth usage to MAX and allowed 20 connections per file in accelerators!
this is much of a help. although th application showed i already had 300 as the limit.
so i let it go!

garv_sk9

this utility is pretty good! equally for geeks and lamers! i have 3-4 downloaders running simultaneously which includes download accelerators and torrent clients. that sum -up to around 50 above outbound connections sometimes! when i have set the bandwitdth usage to MAX and allowed 20 connections per file in accelerators!
this is much of a help. although th application showed i already had 300 as the limit.
so i let it go!

garv_sk9

fwiw, been there, done that, and nothing significant changed.

what made my torrents go fast is a faster pipe (am on 2Meg).

ymmv

Can someone confirm or deny if this works OK in Vista x64?

AngryBadger

You had to have known going in to this article that the Mac snobs were going to have to pipe in.

JLMcCurry

@Jack Doyle:

Yeah, that's such a simple and effective solution to a minor little niggle like this, it should only take me a couple of minutes to install and configure a working Linux distro on my laptop, right? OR, what was your other really useful suggestion? oh, go out and buy another computer entirely! Great. What do you do when you run out of milk in your house, buy a dairy farm?

modernape

Uhm... I never tweaked my Windows for outbound connections, yet I still download with 20 connections from usenet and has done for years...

jacobtf

Uhm... I never tweaked my Windows for outbound connections, yet I still download with 20 connections from usenet and has done for years...

jacobtf

@FreeChaos: it can be done, pulseaudio

SATANJr

Or you can use Usenet.

Grabit (freeware)

Index Sites
www.newzleech.com
www.nzbmatrix.com

AstraWeb @$11USD
BAM

James Craig

Or you can use Usenet.

Grabit (freeware)

Index Sites
www.newzleech.com
www.nzbmatrix.com

AstraWeb @$11USD
BAM

James Craig

@logie: i set my to 50 and not 100. anywho i'm not sure how to "prove it" but it helps reach my max d/l speed. it seems to help put a bit more kb but d/l a torrent always takes times if you open 100000 or 10.

chessyang

Dear virus authors, consider adding a feature to your malware that patches tcpip.sys so you can spread your disease faster.

To me, this seems like a pretty small hurdle to throw in the path of evil doers. And it appears to limit legitimate network traffic, which isn't a particularly good practice when making security choices.

@logie:

I'm skeptical of this new patcher. The old patcher has been around for YEARS and is well tested by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. It's called EVID*bunchofnumbers*patch, and it can be found by googling for "EVID Patch" (it's the first result, a german site). This new GUI may very well sit on top of the old code (it was command line), in which case I'd hope the original author of the patch was given credit. Either way, I'd use the tried and true patcher.

The difference is clear if you have your torrent client set up to maximize the amount of connections at one time. We're talking going from 1/3 your bandwidth to all of it, or getting to your maxiumum speed faster than you otherwise would.

Oh, and when you do some security updates, they undo the patch, so you'll have to repatch. It's very annoying, but it's true.

KCChiefsFan

@LesterGaze:

Ehm, what are you talking about? :P Tcpip.sys half-open connections hack has been known to the users for some years now (since xp sp2 introduced the "fix")

That utility just do it in a -one click only- way. And if you dont know what this is about, you should propably don't even try it :)

Enorym

Windows 2003 Server doesn't come with a limit it seems.

I guess that's why I've always enjoyed slightly faster start-speeds on the server than on a non-server machine.

shinchan

@AngryBadger:

Yea i need the same anwser... I have the hack the manual way (hacked dll and readydriver running) but updates seem to overwrite it now and then, i could really use an easier way!

Enorym

@lankysob:

Well let me tell you...I just found out I broke the 250gb cap...not a fun situation to deal with. Comcast legal department called me and told me I have been streaming an average of 600GB a month for the past three months (surpised me actually).

Now they are are legal downloads (for real). No movies or software...just live shows (audio and video). But I leave Vuze open 24/7 to seed and my ratios are above 2 at each site.

Well they called and told me that the next time I break 250gb/month...I'm banned from Comcast for 6 months!

BuzzKill!

Think I'm going to FIOS..I didn't like that call at ALL!

I ran this on my XP machine yesterday and it brought my OS and internet connection to a crawl. But my system is so tweaked that it was most likely something I did in the past.

seda

@lazaroff: real men use rtorrent.

darkstar misses his preview button

"Microsoft first introduced these limits into Windows as a way to keep users from using Windows desktops as servers, forcing them to buy expensive server versions instead."

There, FTFY

@TunaFish: *patch

I tried this with Windows XP and I haven't tested my Torrent speed, but oh golly, it seems my browser speed just went up a notch. Great path, thanks Lifehacker. Doing it the manual way was a pain for we weakgeek types.

I was trying to figure out what version of windows this works with. I checked the website:

Operating system compatibility:
1)Windows XP SP1(x64)/SP2(x86,x64)/SP3,
2)Vista without SP(x86,x64) and with SP1(x86,x64),
3)Window 7 beta(x86,x64).

wow everything!

"Interface language: English, Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian."

Even multilingual.

Derek Bender

@Phoshi:

The major benefit is that your BT activity doesn't prevent other programs from making connections.

But Perseco's point was that it doesn't matter in the end. The right analogy is acceleration vs top speed for a car. High acceleration (high half-open limit) gets you to your top speed (DL limit of your pipe or peers' upload) faster. Now, if you're a responsible torrenter, it shouldn't matter in the end, as your torrent will be active much longer to fulfill your seeding.

kftgr

"And next month, seed properly."
@Phoshi:

LOL :) I can see his bad seed karma piling up as he delays it month to month.

kftgr

@Derrick4Real: My roommates and I are all IT majors at college, so, needless to say, we use alot of bandwidth (1 TB this month according to the router). Once we heard about this DL cap back in October, we switched to Comcast business edition. Unlimited bandwidth, 28 Mbit down (16 advertised) and 8 Mbit up (2 advertised). We only pay about $99 a month for it.

This probably isn't available everywhere though.

cha0tic

@FreeChaos: For what it's worth, there are alternatives to the explorer shell in Windows, but my experience with them has never been good. Explorer has such deep hooks everywhere in the system that replacements always seem to wind up incredibly buggy and crashy for me. It's like they're trying to force modularity on a system that is not modular.

@Teddy Toggweiler:

Yup. And it works like a charm.

For me, it made a BIG difference. Whenever i had uTorrent downloading something, my internet was slowed down to a crawl, it was a real pain in the ass to surf at the same time. After applying this, my browser' speed went back to lightning fast and all was well.

@Grem135: What service pack are you using? That might explain that.

JB2K

All- for some reason this is very misleading and unclear. I'm surprised at this entry, lifehacker is usually informed.

This will not work in Vista or 7. They have protection against changing the tcp.sys file. There is a beta registry and batch file that attempts to alter something else when the connection limit is reached. It didn't crash my copy of vista, but reports vary. This isn't what I used, but it is more recent: [aadhu.com]

Furthermore, you may not notice improvement, but with most tweaks, you never do. This does improve torrenting and serious multitasking by a reasonable margin. If you have XP, go for it. Set it to at least 50 or 100, but not much higher unless you use load balancing. Whether or not you notice or care about improvement.. to me it seems like it would be dumb not to raise the limit.

As for slowing down worms, if a worm were to theoretically spread at high speeds and ignore every firewall... limiting each computer to 10 connections only delays the worm's global dominance by less than 30 seconds. Pointless security measure limiting is.

This has been available for quite a long time.
[www.lvllord.de]

It really does help with your bittorrent speeds. When you're torrenting, you have connections that appear and drop and appear and drop all the time. Increasing your half open limit will really, really help.

Chandler Newby

@logie: the utorrent/bittorrent techs (i.e. the ppl who build those apps) say it doesn't work and despite that I tried this hack a few times. Seems to have a preliminary effect at start of download/opening of utorrent but thats about it. My best results come from following the detailed guides at the utorrent site. They undoubtedly DO work. Or buy "Utorrent Turbo booster" which really does increase download speeds. God knows how.

idodialog

Capping the half-open connections to 10 does NOT protect other systems from your computer... it just slows it down. I have my half-open set to 1000.

"The forward thinking of Microsoft developers here is that you can only infect 10 new systems per second via TCP/IP ?!?... If you also consider that each of those infected computers will infect 10 others at the same rate:
second 1: 1+10 computers
second 2: 10+10*10 computers (110 new ones)
second 3: 10+100*10 computers ( 1110 new ones)
second 4: 10+1000*10 computers (11110 new ones)
....
all the way to 10*60 + 10^60 computers in a single minute (that's a number with 60 digits, or it would far exceed Earth's population). Even if we consider that 90% of those computers are unreachable/protected, one would still reach ALL of them within a minute"

twig123

Works fine for Vista 32bit at home!