Why is torrent download so slow?

You've plainly and simply got slooooow internet service! Your connection is ONLY 7 times faster than dialup

EDIT: YES your upload speed has EVERYTHING to do with it! If the server has to wait for notification that you received a packet, your connection WILL be slower! I dont know where he got his networking training but he needs to get a refund!

14-17 hours could be good depends what your internet bandwidth is, if you don't know you could check it in your router or you could run a speed test on www.speedtest.net it will tell you what your upload & download speeds are (make sure your not using your torrents or anything thing else web related when doing the test), you may also want to get some sort of graphical bandwidth monitor other than the windows one something like dumeter would do.

You say your uploads always stay below 10kb/s you may have to tweak your torrent clients upload /download ratios etc yours maybe set to upload no higher than this 10kb/s which could be affecting your download speed & hence the many hours if you do have a good internet connection also the whole torrent system is built around sharing & share ratios to which is partly what the trackers are for, leechers that just download & disappear tend not to do so well, but if you want to be able to get & keep a good speed up i recommend trying to keep your seed ratio to a minimum of 1:1 or above & 0.8:1 (lowest) increase the torrent clients upload bandwidth to a usage of around 65-75% of your whole limit (seems to be the sweet spot for me you can play around with it) + i would increase the amount of simultaneous connections which is something you can cross references with your routers specifications or just keep amping up until it has a adverse affect on your traffic flow, theres a miriad of other settings one can play with to enhance your speeds but your best off doen the research for the given client that you use.

One other thing to note is the health of the swarm for best results obviously a good number of seeders (people with the whole file) is always good, but a healthy batch of leechers/peers in there is good to (people with only parts of the file) the higher alround the better, the ones with less just take longer because of other peoples various variables in their setups, clients, hardware & so on & they're just becoming less popular or less seeded by people.

Some other speed notes if you can get on some private trackers for your torrents also you will likely gain some extra download speed but then its a must on share ratios & the likes otherwise you just get banned or have to donate.

You could also look into seedbox's for their fast network connections & you will be able to download your files at your bandwidths limits but there's ongoing costs here for the remote systems.

Check with your internet provider. This is one of the issues behind the 'internet neutrality' act - some IPs will purposely slow down BitTorrent data transfers by inserting their own 'stop/go' commands. It is now thought that 1/3 of all internet traffic is BT. Keep in mind that most IPs allow super-fast downloads but much slower up-loads so you are downloading faster than your sources are up-loading. There are other possible answers

1) Your torrent download speed depends on the upload speed of the seeders you're downloading from, and how many peers are downloading from them. It has nothing to do with your connection's download speed.

2) Your upload speed has nothing to do with your download speed.

6-10 hours