Switeck

DarthYodi, your problem was probably caused by one of uTorrent's "noisy" features: DHT, LPD, UPnP, Resolve IPs, high half open connection limit, or high per-torrent/global connection limit. Lowering any or all of those features should make your problem go away.

Build 11903 is still occasionally getting duplicate ip+port in its Peer List. I haven't seen it trying to contact one multiple times at once since my earlier bug report on the subject though...

These values are simply more conservative...but should work fine for all but the most unusual cases. An earlier post on the thread was from a dual ISDN user who found that the settings were a little low for very slow torrents, but even still he didn't have to use more than 60 connections total.

Even if the details didn't make it into the changelog (yet?)... Ultima's uTorrent v1.8 manual is HERE: http://download.utorrent.com/utorrent-help.zip

uTorrent's improved techniques to "hide" from traffic shaping ISPs may have broken Greedy Torrent's features. Personally, I'd rather keep uTorrent's encryption methods...than "fix" that.

Ok, do you think it's a "usability" bug? Type 0 for Yes, or X for No.

Sorry, I tried to keep it short.

This is a "usability" bug: Upload slots per torrent pet peeve http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=42518 In short, I tried to remove my previous manually-set torrent upload slot setting and returning to default value by deleting the previous setting and then clicking ok. But uTorrent kept reverting back to my previous value.

My settings are a table. I tried to match uTorrent settings I felt were appropriate for the upload bandwidth a connection was capable of sustaining. The rationale behind my choices are firstly to change as little as possible from the original settings and secondly to give whoever uses them what they probably want most: MORE DOWNLOAD SPEED by allowing more downloading torrents and upload slots than is really optimal for sharing/uploading. There are HUGE misunderstandings about both max number connections and half open connection limit. Basically in a nutshell, many people believe "more is better/faster". ...And so spawn the YouTube videos suggesting increasing uTorrent's connections per torrent to over 1000 and half open connection limit from 8 to 50 or more. I saw one that set half open to 500. I can only hope few people see these videos OR take them seriously! Most consumer networking hardware and software can't (or won't without 3rd party modifications) handle 400 connections or a half open value greater than about 20...at least for very long. You can't download faster if your entire networking is overloading, crashing, and constantly disconnecting. Most consumer networking stuff is utter crap, and that even includes the "better" stuff! EVEN if your local networking can handle it...after all, many have 1 gigabit/second home LAN routers now...that doesn't mean your modem can or the local ISP branch line can, or the local internet gateway you and 20+ other ISP customers are sharing can. Local cable connections are actually a hub/star type networking topology where only 1 cablemodem can upload at any given instant. If one has 1000 connections, it is trying to upload constantly...just to stay connected to them all! And that's part of what makes ISPs mad. Similarly, if 1 customer can do that, potentially 10% or more of ALL customers may be doing that. So even if an ISP's networking hardware is 10 times better than the average consumer stuff, it HAS to be! Somewhere around 20-200 cablemodem lines may be fed through a single heavy-duty ISP router/switch. If there's 100 customers active and 10 each have 1000 connections in a file-sharing program that single router has in excess of 10000 connections going through it all at once. Its internal RAM to keep track of them all can even become an issue! Even if the connections are not at high speeds each, together they may cause the router switching delays...seen as high pingtimes and known as "lag". So ISPs hate this even more. Windows XP SP2 and Vista both enforce a half open connection limit of 10 and it does little good to "fight" that limit even with the 3rd party hack to make it work. Microsoft "unpatches" the files that make the hack work almost every minor windows update, or at least once a month. But even if they didn't...a higher half open connection limit is pretty much unnecessary for high-end (10 mbit) broadband and overkill for (<2mbit) low-end broadband. You can set half open limit in uTorrent to ZERO a few minutes after starting a torrent, and if you're not firewalled you will still get new connections because other peers/seeds are almost constantly (re)trying ips of other peers/seeds. These incoming connections don't count against the half open limit, which ONLY applies to outgoing connections and tracker updates. Even when half open is set to 0, it's potentially possible to still get a mini Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack from incoming connections...if your combined active torrents have probably 1000+ peers/seeds trying to make new connections! (That's their half open connections trying to connect to you by the way.) Having said this, I don't recommend using ZERO half open connection limit. Instead, typically stick with the default value of 8 unless you have problems...and if you have problems, reduce it to 1-4. Sadly there is some truth to "more is better". A PURE leech that gives nothing back to anyone can still get pretty fast download speeds so long as it connects to enough peers and seeds. Probably 1 out of 4-20 peers and seeds will be uploading to the pure leech any given moment, so more peers+seeds = more download speed! This is because of altruism built into BitTorrent...it is more concerned about making sure EVERYONE gets the torrent downloaded, not to maximize individual download speeds. There are some Bittorrent-like clients that exploit this altruism to get even more download speed than normal. Older BitComet clients were believed to do this, though it's probable that there were just lots of BitComet cheats, hacks, and mods that did this. BitLeech is the only program I know by name that does this. Obviously, everyone cannot do this (leech with lots of connections) because upload has to come from somewhere. For the same reason, everyone cannot lower their upload to absolute minimum...or download speeds across the board will drop. But what's not so obvious is even having lots of connections reduces max upload speed. It reduces max download speed as well, but most broadband connections have vastly faster download than upload so that matters mostly for the low-end ones. For instance, a 56k dial-up modem using uTorrent's built-in Speed Guide (CTRL+G) is the "Dial-up (56k) settings. Were you to try to use those settings, your modem would potentially be trying to maintain 20 connections on 1 active torrent at a time. It's like trying to web surf by connecting to 5-20 websites at once on dial-up for "more speeds"! By all rights, that's a hefty connection burden, as just sitting idle those connections burn bandwidth! I almost think mine which allows 7 may still be too high for that. A connection that has only 64 kilobits/second usable upload bandwidth in uTorrent's settings is allowed 50 connections for its 1 active torrent. If on average each connection gave 1 KiloBYTE/second download...then while uploading at only 5 KiloBYTES/second, it might receive back 50 KiloBYTES/second in download. That's not a sustainable trade rate for BitTorrent networks in general. This is partially why uTorrent has "Download Limited" when uploading slower than 6 KiloBYTES/second global speed. But that only partially fixes the problem...50 connections even without that limitation will cut into the limited upload speed possible with no way to return the favor in a reasonable amount of time. The ISDN settings are special, these have KNOWN download as well as upload limits that are also equal. All the others (besides dial-up) have much higher download than upload, especially shared lines. So ISDN doesn't need as many connections to reach its download max as a broadband connection with equal upload speed...if only because the broadband's download max is probably MUCH higher. Jumping up to 256 kilobits/second usable upload bandwidth (xx/256k)...uTorrent's settings are 70 connections per torrent, 130 global connections, 22 KiloBYTES/second upload speed, 3 upload slots, 1 active downloading torrent, 2 total active torrents. Even at this much less limited speed as 64, there's a minor problem. Connections per torrent are 40% higher, and with now potentially 2 torrents running at once (1 seeding, 1 downloading)...there can be 130 connections total. That's 1 connection for every 2 kilobits/second total upload bandwidth! It's unnecessary, pretty much excessive. It means there's less upload bandwidth to actually upload pieces of the torrent, puts a tremendous load on marginal networking hardware and software, and increases pingtimes/lag for anyone sharing the internet connection. And it makes ISPs hate us. So my 256 kilobits/second settings are 35 connections per torrent, 60 global connections, 22 KiloBYTES/second upload speed, 3 upload slots, 1 active downloading torrent, 2 total active torrents. The only things that changed were the numbers of connections per torrent and global. This is a reoccurring pattern of my whole chart relative to uTorrent's Speed Guide settings. Seeding torrents DON'T need as many connections as downloading torrents to maintain whatever maximum speeds are desired. This is because there is no longer any incentive to connect to as many peers+seeds as possible to increase your download speed at the expense of the torrent swarm or everyone else...you ALREADY have the whole torrent. If you care about ratios, reasonable amounts but fewer connections for seeds means FASTER upload speeds. If you care about sharing to others, your upload speed is split between all active torrents and split again between upload slots per torrent. If you allow 3 upload slots per torrent, then connecting to more than 3 is done strictly for redundancy (in case one disconnects and in case one downloads slowly.) Such redundancy is probably adequately covered connecting to 10 peers, worst-case 20 peers, and excessive beyond 30. Then there's what I call a high-low torrent activity. Some torrents are just going to be fast, some slow -- either due to lots of peers/seeds or exceptionally fast peers/seeds. If you have multiple downloading torrents, probably only ONE will gain much download speed by reaching max connections...the others either have few peers/seeds to connect to or won't be much faster connecting to a few more. Even if the torrents were somehow identical in speed and number of peers/seeds, little is lost if one connects to fewer peers/seeds than the other/s. In the end, the amount you have to upload to reach a 1-to-1 ratio remains the same and probably will take longer than the download did. So from 384 kilobits/second upload and beyond, even though they are allowed multiple downloading torrents at once...there is not nearly enough global connections for all of the active torrents to reach max at once. This also helps keep uTorrent's connection load low enough that far more consumer networking hardware and software doesn't have problems. It reduces the load slightly on ISPs. And it means the fewer peers you connect to have more incentive to upload BACK to you...since you're spending more of your time and upload bandwidth uploading to EACH of them. So download speeds often still remain decent. In the rare case you connect to a bunch of bad peers and seeds...uTorrent will slowly disconnect inactive ones to replace them with hopefully better ones. And the ones you upload the most to...tend to give you the most back, by design of the BitTorrent protocol. If everyone used similar settings as my suggestions instead of uTorrent's Speed Guide's (or worse), average download speeds would improve noticeably. However those who don't intend to share much...or can't upload fast...will gain less and may even be worse off. BitTorrent will still see that they complete the download so long as enough others play fair. Sadly, many don't play fair. For whatever reasons, they seek 1-sided "BitTorrent speedup" programs that improve their download...or simply set their upload speed low because they heard it makes their download speeds faster. And it DOES if you've set it too high! If your other settings are bad, then even lowering upload speeds to below 50% of rated max might show download speed increases on torrents with numerous seeds and/or fast peers. Or they stop a torrent as soon as it finishes downloading...without seeding much. Those are called "Hit and Runners". The faster they download relative to their upload, the bigger the loss to the torrent swarm (ie: other peers) when they leave. They may have a sizable fraction of the torrent that no one else but seeds have...and put a huge burden on the remaining seeds to re-upload now-missing pieces again. Sequential downloading is covered by the 4th link in my signature...but in short it doesn't HELP the torrent swarm and may not be all that great for you either. The last seeder may quit in disgust after uploading 5+ times the size of the torrent (mostly the 1st file over and over again) and nobody else has the whole torrent yet. Then no one wins. Even ISPs lose as the remaining peers and new peers upload all they have to each other and end up with unusable content. "It goes fast till it hits 69% then download speed instantly falls to 0!"...is the typical comment resulting from such a torrent. 100's of new peers may join and get 69% and be unable to complete for days OR EVER, thus making the bandwidth wasted a curse that continues cursing. uTorrent's Scheduler allows us to not overuse our connection based on time-of-day...especially helpful if you're sharing your connection or have to contend with ISP "peak hours" that have reduced speeds. People only use it if forced even though it's not terribly complicated. It *DOES* have a major problem in that uTorrent doesn't reduce max connections (as far as I know!), max active torrents, or upload slots during Limited periods. ISPs probably would only prefer if "turn off" was used during peak hours, so no love there either. Many ISPs have become extremely hostile towards file-sharing traffic in general and BitTorrent traffic in particular. Despite the encryption support added to uTorrent, uTorrent is horribly slow for many people. Future improvements in the encryption seem unlikely to help any, as it's all kinds of activity patterns rather than reading the raw data that ISPs are now monitoring. Even if you aren't on a particularly hostile ISP, you WILL NEED ENCRYPTION ENABLED OR FORCED in uTorrent to connect to many that are. I expect things to get worse rather than better in the short-term, as more and more ISPs see file-sharing as an insatiable bandwidth eater. They are at least part right. I imagine world wide web usage and bandwidth has increased considerably too since it first appeared in 1993. Can't be called an "ISP" if you block that though. The miracle of BitTorrent file-sharing is not that it can give high download speeds, but that it works at all in spite of horrible odds.

I happen to LIKE the way it looks now. And I've been messing with the appearance so much more than the data contained now that I feel like I'm ignoring the point of it all. The 3rd example isn't a case of using a different font as far as I know.

Whatever crazy font you are using isn't fixed size. My signature makes references to both this message thread and the one you mentioned.

gomp said: "Du meter shows my current upload speed as 65-75kB/sec with 30kB/sec been on utorrent, the rest is all ack packets been sent to allow the downloading... So I have about 30kB/sec spare so the theory is I could increase my cap to 60kB/sec which is just over 50%. But my latency would go through the roof then as it will be saturated." This HIGHLY suggests you're allowing quite a lot of connections at once in uTorrent, EACH of which require regular "Keep-alive" packets. This costs bandwidth just to keep them. There is a happy medium where you can upload a little faster and yet still have quite a lot of connections.

Should be ok at 60-70% though, or you have other issues.

James_D, YES! A LOT higher! Your upload speed typically should stay maxed out once you're running enough torrents that you have >10 peers connected to you at once which are missing anything you have. gomp, Your ADSL line may be in a partial half duplex mode. You may not have 1 megabit/second upload speed max either. The amount of upload slots I recommend is slightly greater than typical Speed Guide gave. You should never need more active upload slots than you're actually giving in KiloBYTES/second upload speed. Really even half as many is pushing it. So if you're only uploading at 30 KiloBYTES/second, that means 15 upload slots...TOTAL. If you have 2 torrents active, that's 7-8 upload slots per torrent. gomp, please continue this topic here: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=344199#p344199 (that's your thread on the subject after all...)

If your networking hardware and software can take it, increase the per-torrent connections max as high as 250. What's your upload speed doing at the same time? Is it staying constant at 140 KiloBYTES/second?

superaki, You have 1 megabit/second upload speed...so you plug the values in my chart for 1 megabits/second: Upload Speed Limit: 92 KiloBYTES/second Upload slots PER torrent: 6 Global Connections max: 200 Per-torrent Connection max: 60 Max active Torrents: 7 Max downloading Torrents: 5

UltimateP3, I don't who you're thanking...or for what. But thanks.

That message link Firon pasted lets us get past all the bullshit and actually deal with the problem. If you don't give us the information that post ASKS for, then you really don't want help with your problem as you'd prefer to just bitch. I'm not interested in your age, I just wish you wouldn't waste your time and ours arguing that you don't want help or that we don't want to give it. WE NEED MORE INFORMATION, period. Too many times, the person having trouble is too close to the problem and often overlooks something out of frustration. Make a separate Speed problems forum post instead of cluttering this one.

You seem to be on ComCast Cable ISP, so you probably need to use either xx/384k or xx/768k in Speed Guide (CTRL+G). If you're doing mostly private torrents, then you can disable DHT and Local Peer Discovery and possibly see a tiny speed increase on download/upload speeds.

I guess I need to ask if the chart, as I have changed it, is typically understandable at 1024x768 with Internet Exploiter (Explorer) maximized...seeing as I have no intentions of putting I.E. on this computer. Even if my suggestions are almost entirely scrapped, there are 2 that I feel cannot be ignored and need to be placed in uTorrent soon: 1.bells, whistles, sirens, glowing big red blinking letters if we have to...to express upload not download max! 2.The default setting when people forgot to enter any settings at all should be conservative...lest people think "ah, it doesn't NEED to be set for my connection, it runs 'great' without any!" -- but still good enough settings that they are decent seeders and get at least semi-decent download speeds in return. Any setting higher than 1.5 megabits/sec really doesn't matter much at all. Although more and more people have lines that fast, generally these are the people who paid extra (for a premium, faster line) knowing what they want and hopefully what to expect. ...They won't be satisfied with standard specs and will tweak everything anyway. (Think overclockers that aren't nuts. )

I'm fine with it as long as I know who edited it. Yeah, it looked TERRIBLE before so almost any formatting change is an improvement. I made it larger to almost fill the page at 1024x768 maximized (on Mozilla FireFox). It's hard to hold the max connections below 100 if you're at 768 kilobits/sec upload speed. You've got to have at least 20 connections per torrent for megabit/sec and faster DOWNLOAD connections...otherwise torrents with few seeds will likely choke with all the peers at the same percentage.

There are ways via peer exchange and setting half open connections to 0 to simulate a higher level encryption in uTorrent. You must also have DHT disabled...and possibly resolve IPs as well. Because trackers aren't contacted when half open connections are set to 0, some ISP blocking methods aren't triggered. HOWEVER, this absolutely requires you to be unfirewalled (green light) in uTorrent and may even require you to reset your modem and router occasionally. Having a high max connection count could be bad, as although the ISP monitoring software/hardware may still treat your BitTorrent traffic with hostility due to the myriad of connections to you on a single port. So it may be required to keep connection max as low as 5!

The settings are a little conservative. However that is the point: To work with the most connections/networks/situations/software with the least problems...maximizing download speed is only a secondary goal. The higher your upload speed, the easier it is to find others that will return the favor. So as long as your upload speed PER upload slot is reasonable, even very low connections per torrent (such as 10!) is often enough to get download speeds at least equal to upload speeds. And the numbers I suggested should still yield good results even on poorly-seeded torrents. The settings also have another goal: make good sharers! Totally maximizing download speed is often done at the expense of others on the same torrents.

Is there any other important/common speed settings that are different enough than the others to merit adding them to Speed Guide? (If you mention stuff faster than 100 megabits/sec upload speed...ANYONE with a line that fast *SHOULD* know enough about networking to use manual settings themselves. )

kurahashi, I Agree! It takes VERY little space to change the way to post them from: "xx/64k" to "64kbit UPLOAD" ...Or better yet, like you suggest: "64 kilobits/second UPLOAD bandwidth" This simple change would reduce probably more than 50% of newbie confusion. Though many ISPs don't bother to mention upload bandwidth limit...even hiding it in fine print, or not mentioning it AT ALL on promotionals! :mad: (A certain CenturyTel ad comes to mind...and I thought they might be an ok ISP!) I shall go back and edit my chart to better reflect the 'upload nature' of the settings...though I may take a day to finally post it. Going to have to try reformatting columns and all. I kinda want more replies on further tweaks and suggestions, especially if 1 speed seems like it has too-low or ridiculous settings. I still think maybe dial-up 28.8k should probably have fewer connections...and even dial-up 56k probably as well! But I want others' opinions on that before I make that change, especially from people who actually USE uTorrent on dial-up! dAbReAkA, I do admit xx/200mbit , xx/500mbit , xx/1gbit values will probably "never" be used. Even many connections rated that fast on download probably have their upload being tied up by data center related traffic, especially for big websites/servers. Even the xx/5mbit setting will almost never be used, except by people who mistakenly think their upload equals their download on cable and ADSL lines. jewelisheaven, I guess I should mention a recommended "no settings" starting default value as well...since most people probably won't work too well with unlimited upload speed, 4 upload slots, 50 connections per torrent, 200 global max, 8 active torrents, and 5 downloading torrents is total overkill for anything short of 1+ megabit/sec upload lines. ...and even then the unlimited upload is overkill probably for 10 megabit/sec upload lines. So, for a "no settings" starting default value...let's assume an "average" setting of about xx/256k: Upload Speed: 20 KiloBYTES/sec Upload Slots: 3 Connections Per Torrent: 30 Global Connection Max: 50 Active Torrents: 2 Max Active Downloading Torrents: 1