Imagine being on the autobahn with the accelerator down and then you realize that you are driving a wrecked car. The plight is not so uncommon on the information superhighway too.
Your ISP is where it starts
Choosing the right BitTorrent client
Go for healthy seeds and peers
Get through the firewall
Limit your upload rate
Go to a different port
Increase the number of Max Half Open TCP connections
clipped from: www.makeuseof.com 
Imagine being on the autobahn with the accelerator down and then you realize that you are driving a wrecked car. The plight is not so uncommon on the information superhighway too.