Sorry, no OS4 experience, but have you tried the same torrent on another system? Perhaps it's the peers themselves. I've found some torrents that are horribly slow and others that get decent rates. (Although, even on the good ones I have never seen over 40kB/s).
Yeah... Same here. No AmiTorrent experience. The overhead number stated sounds way too high for the torrent traffic, though.
Is AmiTorrent a port of Bram's official client, or one of the others? On my PC, I stick with Bram's official client because it has a lot less overhead than some of the others I've used. (Azureus is one of the worst offenders of overhead, though it also has some really nice features.) On an official Bram's port, you shouldn't see more than 10% overhead. On others, I've seen as high as 25%. Yours appears to be still higher than that, though.
Anyhow, as adolescent says... Torrent speed depends almost entirely on the group of peers on the torrent you are downloading. Not the raw numbers of peers, but the upload bandwidth of the few direct peers your computer picks out. I've seen some well-seeded (200 seeds / 50 dl'ers) torrents crawl along, while some low-seeded seeded (5 seeds / 20 dl'ers) simply FLY. BitTorrent has the potential to max your connection, regardless of what you have. From a good site, it's not uncommon to see 200kB+ downloads, if your connection can handle it.
Another thing to consider is your upload bandwidth. There are two problems that can occur when you don't have enough upstream connection. One is that if you don't upload enough, the BitTorrent client throttles your download speed, as you aren't seeding fast enough. This just slows down the torrent evenly.
The other is (often times with CableModems) your file upload will saturate your connection to the point that it chokes your download by not allowing the "ACK" packets to be sent. Your upload will be maxed and your download will drop to about 5kB/sec. There should be a way to set your client to max out at about 80% of your upstream to avoid this problem.
Anyhow, I've used BitTorrent a lot to download everything from old TV shows to Linux ISO CD images. It's really a nice protocol. I'm interested to hear more about how the OS4 one works out.
