uTorrent goes out of control, downloading all torrents

[monsoon]

First, let me say I've done a bit of searching, but haven't been able to find this problem. But the description is not one that is conducive to searching so I could have just missed the posts.

Okay, so I have uTorrent 1.6 (build 474) running pretty much 24/7 set to do a maximum of 5 downloads. I tend to leave it on a low bandwidth drip with a ton of things queued. I use a private service that has a lot of torrents that people could download. So I set my total number of active torrents to 50 and number of upload slots at 10 per torrent with the <90% checkbox checked. Because of the way that the site is set up, even though I'm making 20 or 30 seeds available, people are only actually downloading from a maximum of 2 or 3 seeds at any given time.

I've fiddled with all kinds of settings just playing around, so let me know if there are others you might want to know about.

The problem is that at some point, uTorrent will decide to kick off extra downloads past the 5. I'll come back to my computer to find that it has every single queued download set to an active download, with most of them chugging along at 0.1 kB/s or something. I can try pause, stop, start, etc. and nothing gets it to realize it needs to bring it back to 5. I restart uTorrent and it then starts downloading the first 5, just like normal. These five get enough bandwidth to fill up my limit and all is good.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

[DreadWingKnight]

Sounds like you're running too many torrents at once, and because of the low activity on the small set, uTorrent starts rating the 0-transfer torrents as "Too damn slow" and stops counting them against queue totals.

If you run the small number of torrents at a time, and turn off the queue.dont_count_slow_ul advanced setting (on by default) you should see an improvement in behavior.

Just make sure that the torrents you're seeding have high activity to generate good rotation in your seed pool.

[monsoon]

Well, the very reason I'm running more is that it's inconsistent when the people uploading will be available or how fast they will be uploading (private site=fewer users). I find when I only have one or two torrents as the max, I'll often get stuck using only 1 or 2 kB/s.

Still, doesn't it seem that there should be some intelligence in the way that it decides this? It seems that only expanding the torrent count and never decreasing it is a recipe for failure whenever something happens to slow down your access.

I think I'll leave it at 5 and try the setting you gave. Thanks for the help!

[Switeck]

"So I set my total number of active torrents to 50 and number of upload slots at 10 per torrent with the <90% checkbox checked."

...qualifies as hostile settings.

You're running potentially 500 upload slots at once (50 x 10). To run all that and be fair with your upload, you'd need 1,500 KB/sec upload speed. You could get away with only 500 KB/sec if typically only 1/3 of those 50 torrents were active at a time though...maybe even a little less if even the active torrents seldom had more than 5 peers/leeches on them.

Try reducing upload slots down to 3-4, max active torrents down to 10, and enable queue.dont_count_slow_ul advanced setting. And keep the <90% checkbox checked to allow more upload slots if for some reason you're not maxing out your upload.

[monsoon]

Don't give me "hostile settings". I have a max of 3 or 4 people downloading from seeds at once. I wouldn't have these same settings for public torrents. That's just how this site works out. Otherwise, I wouldn't have it set this way.

I still don't see what this has to do with my question of out of control DOWNLOADS. Reducing the max active to 10 will probably just make 10 the max number of downloads it tries when it gets out of whack. Which is just as bad as 50 to me (i.e. requires a restart).

[monsoon]

Okay, maybe it would be helpful if I explain what I'm trying to accomplish with my settings.

While my u/l bandwidth limit is underutilized, I would like it to seed all the completed downloads that aren't stopped. This way, people on the site can see all the stuff I have to offer. But once I either get my u/l bandwidth tapped out, the seeds no one are downloading from should go queued (so people don't try to connect and find that I'm out of bandwidth already).

So far, I haven't been able to find a combination of settings that works. I either wind up with a bunch that are Queued Seed even when no one is downloading or I wind up with uTorrent trying to actively seed too many torrents at once, causing each to get a smaller fraction of the bandwidth than fewer seeds would get.

This has nothing to do with the original problem (I think), but I just thought I would elaborate since people seem to be fixating on the upload part of the description.

[Switeck]

If there NEVER is more than 10 torrents active at once, then it's only a problem if you're using too many upload slots on each. Because you have the <90% checkbox checked, you don't need to set upload slots per torrent above 5. By reducing upload slots per torrent from 10 to 4-5, you'd halve the potential problems as well as seeding pieces of the torrents faster. 10 people with half a torrent piece each would each have nothing to share, 4-5 people with 1 whole torrent piece each creates 4-5 more sources for those pieces.

If there's seldom more than 5 torrents active at once, you could leave max active torrents set rather high...but it's better to just enable queue.dont_count_slow_ul and queue.dont_count_slow_dl advanced settings to avoid even potential overload conditions.

The next version/s of µTorrent should automate seeding lots of torrents at once better -- by doing multiscrapes of trackers to know which torrents need additional seeds and which ones it can quit seeding because they already have sufficient seeds/availability.

[monsoon]

Good to hear about the new feature. But out of curiosity, what is "sufficient"? The site I use tends to have a few torrents that have a ton of users with most others being seeded by a few people at any given time.

[Switeck]

You'd have to ask ludde, and as he hasn't coded and released a working version of it I haven't a clue.

Currently though, enabling queue.dont_count_slow_ul and queue.dont_count_slow_dl advanced settings should at least vastly reduce the amount of management time you have to do.

As should having upload slots set only 3-5 (yes, I'll include 3 here as it's enough for seeding -- you only need/want more for downloading) but with the <90% checkbox checked so if your upload speed drops below 90% set max more upload slots will be used. Having 80 upload slots going at ~0.5 KB/sec each isn't as useful as 20 going at 2 KB/sec or better yet 10 at 4 KB/sec.

[monsoon]

Okay, so back to the original question, is it just a shortcoming of uTorrent that if you have queue.dont_count_slow_dl on and it you run into some difficulty and it decides to max out your download count, you just have to restart to get it to drop back down?