Like I suspect quite a few original content seeds, I am becoming very frustrated with the very poor standards of Bittorrenting shown this year. Just over half of all peers who attempt to download from me can not do so at decent download speeds. With more and more peers gaining access to proper cable broadband and not DSL (Phone line) connections this should not be the case.
It is clear to me as a seed watching these peers that they are running too many active torrents - that is downloading more than one torrent at a time as I see them stop and start there download as there Bit Torrent clients attempts to limit the number of active connections to the number pre set in there client.
Running more than one download at any time, brings with it the laws of ever diminishing returns for the following reasons:
1. Your upload bandwidth gets divided by the number of active torrents, limiting how much you can upload to each swarm.
2. As you are now limited in what you can upload to the swarm, your download speed suffers badly. No one is going to give you bits when you do not give back.
BIT TORRENT is just like LIFE. The More you put into Life the More you get back. The more you upload* to the swarm, the faster you download from it. *Avoid maxing out your upload speed though.
Other bad habits I see are:
1. Not taking the time to read the torrent description and take note of the seeder's requests, that is just downloading from the list using the magnet link and not opening the torrent description page at all.
2. About 35% of all peers hit and run, that is the second they reach 100% they stop the torrent and move the data contents or remove the torrent from there clients seeding list.
All torrent clients will limit the number of connections each torrent can have as well as give you a total connection list. In my Vuze client in the advanced spreadsheet (original) View this looks like this. NOTE I have 250 down and 15 up (megabits per second) and yours will look a lot less.
In the attachment picture you can see at my bandwidth Vuze allows me 30 upload slots on each torrent swarm I am part of. At lower bandwidth settings this will drop anywhere between 2 and 7. Bit Torrent will not let you have less than two upload slots so as you download you can seed.
The important setting though is the Max Connections per Torrent (120) and the Max Connections Globally (900). Mine are quite high, reflecting the larger bandwidth I enjoy. Yours may be a lot, lot LESS and running dozens of downloads will mean you will quickly hit that limit and not only damage your own download speeds, but that of all the swarms you pollute as a direct result of your bad bit torrent habits.
PLEASE GUYS & Girls, just run the one downloading torrent at a time until you are done. If your download speed is still slow then contact the original seed and tell him or her to pull there finger out. You may well find that the seed is running too many active torrents at the same time as well, so you can see how badly this is effecting bit torrent traffic in 2017. Average swarm speeds should be going up with time, NOT DOWN>
REMEMBER if a very slow downloading peer in any swarm you are a part of has a unique BIT you want to reach 100% you may not get it if they are unable to upload to the swarm due to an overloaded bit torrent client, so this affects everyone, not just the original seed who is impatient to move on to the next project.
There is so much wrong with that i.e. all of it; that I cannot be bothered typing out the wall of text that would be necessary to refute it line by line.
Fortunately, I don't believe anyone will read it let alone take any notice. But if anyone does, and cannot see for themselves why any particular part of it is wrong, let me know and I'll try to dispose of it in chunks.
[But, basically, speeds are almost totally irrelevant when torrenting. Ignore everything above and carry on with what you're doing (which isn't doing any of the harm claimed).]
The biggest problem I see here is that you spend way too much time watching your bitorrent client.
Here is how you should be seeding:
1) start the torrent
2) walk away from your computer
3) check in once in a while
4) when availability is greater than 1.0, stop the torrent
5) grab a bottle of lube and reward yourself for contributing something to the community
There are any number of things you can attempt to think about strategically when you are torrenting.
You should only limit yourself to one download if there is a healthy swarm [you can max your dl speed on it] and getting the content downloaded is the difference between getting laid or not. Even then, you can just adjust the prioritization in your client to get that torrent first, and then resume a queue of other torrents.
Too much upload speed contributed to a swarm on a public tracker contributes to people performing hit and runs. The basic principle is that, as people are downloading, they are uploading. The longer it takes them to download, the longer they are alive uploading [assuming basic hit and run mentality; some good hearted samaritans seed for longer]. There are also torrents with simply too many seeders that if you were to attempt to seed out to a certain ratio, you would be waiting forever because the content is already just that well seeded. You could wait forever trying to get an earnest ratio.
The amount of upload connections does not affect the rate at which you upload raw data [except for a tiny amount of protocol overhead ,which is essentially negligible.]. Depending on your connection's upload speed, you can set a reasonable number. Set it too low, and the people downloading from you might not have a good enough connection to get a good speed from you, = not utilizing upload speeds. Setting connections to high in general can cause issues with your router, especially if you are using an older router that can't handle many upload connections with grace. You could start dropping connections and notice hits in your other internet traffic.
May 04, 2017, 20:58 pm (This post was last modified: May 04, 2017, 20:59 pm by plhbg.sprby. Edited 1 time in total.)
For hit and run issues you can make them stay in the swarm by seeding 99.9% of the content.
That way they would most likely to stay seeing that they still need a few bytes.
Let the leechers accumulate and when the swarm reaches its peak size (no longer expanding) maybe you can now let them go by giving the remaining bytes.
May 20, 2017, 05:24 am (This post was last modified: May 20, 2017, 05:31 am by rigmar_radio.)
Let me be a little bit clearer here. HIT AND RUN I do not mind so much, it is the very SLOW DOWNLOAD SPEEDS caused by bad practises such as downloading dozens of torrents all at once and then boasting about how many seeding torrents you are running all at the same time forcing seeders to stay seeding for days or weeks or even MONTHS so these people can reach 100% on a torrent size most can download in a half hour or LESS.
OVER 60% of peers seen by Rigmar download at speeds well below 1.25 Megabytes per second MB/s or 10 Megabits per second mbps.
That is JUST SO WRONG in 2017 and is totally messing up everyone in the swarm they pollute with there sloppy bit torrent habits.
With little or no upload bandwidth left due to the sheer number of active torrents they run, the download speed on each torrent, or in the case of seeding torrents there upload speed to each peer is truly pathetic and in some situations they can be holding bits of a torrent which are in great demand, but as they have maxed out there bandwidth can never seed back to the swarm. They are in fact just leeching. Bit torrent clients can not compensate for stupid behaviour such as seeding and downloading over 100 active torrents at the same time grrrr...
And before you all howl in protest, JUST LOOK at the HD TV TORRENTS in any decent site. You will see they are a lot less popular due to there download size, often in excess of 1GB. YET THE SAD FACT IS I and many other peers go there to download as the people in these large torrents as a rule actually know that seeding to the swarm while they download speeds up there download as well as others in the swarm and they simply are FASTER than the much smaller 300 MB standard resolution TV download swarms, despite the fact they have MORE SEEDS and larger swarms. Pretty well proves my point.
POOR torrent management is reducing download speeds more and more despite advances in overall internet speeds around the World. Why do you think may go to private sites to torrent, They get faster download speeds that is why. Slow downloading peers are KILLING BIT TORRENT and forcing people to stream TV and Films in 2017. Pathetic if you ask me, and I have been torrenting SINCE 2003!!! I now ban slow downloading peers. I kick them off the swarm. They can wait until other seeds are made and grab my content from them.
Let's be truthful here, most bit torrent users have no idea.
Again, everything there is nonsense and if anyone is unsure why any particular part of it is wrong please ask and I'll explain why.
But this part IS interesting:
(May 20, 2017, 05:24 am)rigmar_radio Wrote: in some situations they can be holding bits of a torrent which are in great demand, but as they have maxed out there bandwidth can never seed back to the swarm.
...not because it's valid--it isn't--but because I've never heard that particular misconception before so I am willing to spend some time working though it.
Let us imagine Rigmar has just started seeding a torrent which I download (and upload) "slowly" and 4 others download (and upload) "quickly".
We will each request the rarest pieces. Initially, there will be many equally rare pieces and our clients will choose randomly between them in deciding what to request. So even though I'm slow I will obtain some pieces that the others don't have.
Eventually, Rigmar will have uploaded 100% of the pieces. At that point I will possibly have a few pieces which nobody other than he has. It won't be very many because a) I'm only downloading much slower than those other peers so they will already have downloaded the lion's share of pieces and b) even though I'm also a slow uploader I will have been uploading those pieces to others all along so I'll no longer have exclusive copies of everything that I've downloaded and c) if Rigmar was super seeding (as he should have been) I'll only ever have a maximum of one such piece, because his torrent client won't upload anything to me until it sees the previous piece it uploaded to me on another peer.
So once Rigmar has completed uploading 100% of pieces at worst he will have to re-upload to "fast" peers the few pieces which I have downloaded and not reuploaded. The difference in the seeding requirement will be insignificant.
But what if EVERYONE is slow, and there are no fast peers? In that case, the whole thing does take longer, but seedboxes run unattended 24/7 so that doesn't matter. And it doesn't require any more total uploading from Rigmar than it would if all peers were fast.
tl; dr = "slow" peers which don't upload don't make any significant difference to a swarm
(May 20, 2017, 05:24 am)rigmar_radio Wrote: I now ban slow downloading peers. I kick them off the swarm. They can wait until other seeds are made and grab my content from them.
That's not the way it works. You cannot kick them out of the swarm, you can only kick them off your client.
And then they don't wait for anything they just carry on downloading from the other peers. It won't actually make any difference to them at all.
Torrent clients have default settings. Usually the best thing to do is to just let them untouched. The default max number of download slots is usually around 5, so no one is really downloading "dozens of torrents" simultaneously, unless you are playing with those default settings.
The only thing that deserves mention, imo, is to limit the upload speed of the torrent client (by a third or so), if you think the download speed is not getting maximized, and you think it should because of the health of the swarm. Anyway this is only relevant in asymmetric (DSL) connections, in symmetric fiber connections you just forget about everything.
