After reading numerous enthusiastic endorsements of BitTorrent, I downloaded the client and tried to get Mandrake 9.1 images from the network. I must say I was not impressed. The estimated time to complete the download was 42 hours, at about 10KB/sec. Normally I can download at around 135KB/sec. Worse, my client was uploading at around 20KB/sec! On my assymetrical connection, uploads degrade downloads. Is this something BitTorrent does not account for? The client should limit uploads to at most, say, 10% of downloads. Otherwise there is little reason for the user to participate. Certainly if uploads were going to be 200% of downloads I would never use it.

Also their FAQ desperately needs a "How do run this farking program?" section. /usr/bin/btdownloadprefetched.py is not obvious.