Everyone is always on the lookout for tips of tricks to speed up their torrents. If you have already tried out every single torrent guide but haven't gotten very far, Ono may be what you need. Here is the official description of Ono:
The main goal of this plugin is simple -- to improve download speeds for your BitTorrent client. For most P2P applications, the decision regarding which peer to download from is generally arbitrary. When most peers offer good download performance, the random solution works well. However, if most peers are in a different part of the world from you, your downloads can really suffer.
The Ono plugin avoids this by proactively finding peers that are close to you (in a networking sense). These peers generally offer better response time, which can lead to significantly improved performance. We identify those peers that are near you by reusing network measurements from content distribution networks (CDNs), i.e. without performing extensive path measurement or probing.
Ono's idea is simple - it finds peers who are close to you. How does this help your torrents? Closer peers result in lower latency which means that the response is also faster. Consider this situation. Which of these would be faster if you were limited to a fixed transfer rate - sending and receiving messages from someone living on earth or an alien in outer space? The same idea applies to Ono. Local peers in general can communicate quicker with your computer so that your torrents will finish faster.
Another benefit is that the amount of errors is likely to drop. If you have downloaded a large torrent before, you shouldn't be surprised to know that some data has to be discarded due to errors. Torrent clients file this data under the wasted category. The reasons that errors occur are varied but one of them could be due to the long time they spend traveling from your computer to your peers' computers or vice versa. With peer location optimization in Ono, it should be possible in theory to reduce these errors.
Although peers closer to you have lower latency, it doesn't necessarily mean your torrents will download quicker. This is due to the fact that the bandwidth of local peers may not be as high as those elsewhere. Consider the hypothetical situation earlier about sending messages. The person on Earth may receive his message in one second, while the alien waits for two seconds before his message arrives. If you could only send one message per second to the person on Earth while you could send one large message (which is equivalent to 10 Earth messages) in two seconds to the alien, communication with the alien would be faster. Even though it may take a longer amount of time for messages to reach the alien, it would be faster than the one on Earth if you could send more messages at once to the alien.
While Ono may not speed up your torrents, anything is worth a try especially when you're getting low download transfers. There's always the option to uninstall if you don't like it. If you're planning to try out Ono, you'll need to download Azureus (torrent client) as well. Azureus is cross-platform, so you can use it whether you're on Windows, Mac OSX or Linux.
[Source: TorrentFreak via digg]