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What do the "swarm" numbers really mean?


Rekrul

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I understand the general meaning of a "swarm", but not what it means as far as being able to connect to those seeds & peers.

Right now, I'm downloading a fairly rare torrent and for a long time, the seeds column in the top window said Seeds: 0 (0) and the lower pane said Seeds: 0 of 0 connected (1 in swarm). The availability bar had some red spots and the numerical value was .986.

What I don't understand is why it says that there's at least one seed in the swarm, but the other numbers seem to be indicating that there aren't any seeds that I can connect to. Shouldn't it say Seeds: 0 of 1 connected (1 in swarm) and Seeds: 0 (1) in the top window?

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Except that the availability fluctuates all over the place based on what seeds and peers I'm connected to.

There are two seeds, so shouldn't the availability be at least 1.0?

For that matter, why has uTorrent been sitting idle for like the last six hours rather than connecting to the two seeds listed in the General information?

This is the part I don't understand about BitTorrent, you need seeds to finish a download, but even when there ARE seeds, uTorrent seems happy to just sit there twiddling its thumbs.

Since posting the above image, the number of peers has gone from 11 down to 4. The most likely explanation I can think of is that they managed to connect to the seeds, finished downloading the file and then closed their clients. If they can connect to the seeds to get the parts they need, why can't I?

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Ok, it finally finished downloading. Normally I am more patient, it just looked like it was never going to connect to the Seeds.

Now I have the opposite problem; I want to seed the file, but of the 6 peers listed, only one is downloading from me. I'm connected to two of them, one is downloading steadily, but the other only downloads a few bytes at a time (560K so far). Occasionally someone else will connect for a couple seconds, but then they disappear. The peer that's downloading is using Bitlord 1.1 and has the flags UI, the peer who isn't downloading is using Azureus 3.0.5.0 and has the flags UE.

I set uTorrent to seed to infinity (-1), I have free upload slots available, I still have about 100K of upload bandwidth, I'm not running anything else that's using the net (other than Firefox which is only open to this site), I don't have any other active torrents at the moment (other than the one that's been stuck at 15.6% for months), there's only a single IP address listed as being blocked in the logger tab and I have a green checkmark in the statusbar.

To verify whether AT&T is interferring with seeding, I downloaded a relatively small, but popular torrent. After finishing, it immediately started seeding to 4 peers and maxxed out my upload bandwidth.

I don't understand why 4 of the peers aren't connecting to me and even one of the ones who is, isn't downloading more than a few bytes at a time.

Update: 4/1/08

Since this was a relatively rare torrent, I've been leaving it online to help others. Some people have been downloading from me, but it also goes for long periods of time where I'm not uploading anything even though there are 4-6 peers. For example;

utorrent1zg5.th.jpg

Notice that I'm connected to a peer, but not uploading anything. The Peers tab has the flags UI for this user.

I don't understand how there can be so many peers, but they're not connecting to me. Or why they connect, but don't download anything.

I just checked and now it says Peers: 0 of 6 connected (3 in swarm).

I've rolled out the welcome mat, why is everyone staying away?

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