Default Port 51413 or Custom Port?

[Debu]

]I was getting a bit frustrated because Transmission wasn't connecting to enough peers. In fact, for the past few days I was trying to download a torrent that had 1 seed and 6 leeches (one being me, I think), and I was not able to connect with ANY peers; there were no peers in the Peers Torrent Inspector window. I tried restarting Trans, restarting everything, fooling with the router and modem, different versions of Transmission (including nightly builds) -- everything I could think of -- all to no avail. And yes, my port was open.

It finally occurred to me that I had set my "Peer listening port" to something other than the default port (51413). I did that in accord with the instructions in Transmission Help, which read:

Open Transmission, go to preferences, and enter a number for the port. It is recommended you pick a random number between 49152 and 65535. Let's use 50001 for now. Then quit Transmission.

I had selected a port in the 54000 range, which was something easy for me to remember.

Anyway, since I didn't know what else to try, I decided to try resetting the "Peer listening port" to the default selection of 51413. The port was successfully auto-mapped and I was connected to the seed and 4 leeches (5 of the available 6 peers) in no time flat. Several more peers also appeared in a second small-swarm torrent that I had running.

I don't know whether this was a fluke -- I might just have picked a lousy port -- or whatever else, but if anyone has picked a "custom" peer listening port and is having a problem connecting to peers, I suggest that you try the default port instead. If it's not a fluke and there are many other ports that produce the same result, I suggest that the Transmission Help "Port Forwarding a Router" page be revised to suggest that the user try using the default peer listening port before testing a custom setting.

[shigazaru]

I would also like to know the answer...

any advantage to choose the default port?

why do I see in my router/firewall log, so many hits on the default port while I am not using it ?

other clients trying to use that default port... so I should get more speed/connections by using it.