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Connection limiting on seeding torrents


YenRug

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Hi, first post, but it's something I've sort of wanted to see for a while, now. As it stands, you can control how many connections can be made to active torrents, with a maximum per torrent and a maximum in total. That works perfectly well, for when your downloading, but I sometimes find it a problem when I have a finished file and I'm only seeding back. I'm quite open to be being told there's a problem with this suggestion, but this is my perspective on this.

OK, my download speed tops out around the 800KB/sec mark, but my upload strangles at around 35KB/sec, though I usually throttle it to 25~30KB/sec. Now, when downloading files, obviously, I'm going to want as many connections as possible, to be able to pull data from; however, whilst I have a reasonable upload speed, it gets pretty pointless having, say, 50 connections when I simply cannot service them in a reasonable manner. I have also noticed that, sometimes, an excess of connections can impact my internet performance, when they're all going upstream.

To this end, my suggestion is that there be an option to limit the number of connections on a torrent, when it is seeding, both as a global setting per torrent and as an individual over-ride in a torrent's properties. The reasons are:

1. Reduces excessive connections which may impact internet traffic.

2. Gives those who are connected the chance of a greater share of upload bandwidth, i.e. 10 people sharing 25KB/sec could get an average of 2.5KB/sec each, whereas 50 would get an average of 0.5KB/sec each.

3. Frees up connections for the global maximum, meaning active downloads do not lose out to seeding torrents who cannot realistically exploit their overabundance of connections, anyway.

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Now, when downloading files, obviously, I'm going to want as many connections as possible

When taking protocol overhead into consideration, you actually don't want as many connections as possible. You want a smart number for your internet connection. Protocol overhead will eat your connection alive if you have too many peer connections.

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OK, so I should really have written "as reasonably possible", but the suggestion isn't here to debate settings you should try using. Mine are set quite comfortably, barring when a torrent is seeding and ends up with way too many connections; the only way to solve the problem is stopping the torrent and hoping other active ones pick up the excess, before restarting. That is the point of the suggestion, to give an extra level of control to prevent "protocol overheads" becoming a problem.

Seems some people are going to get caught up on this, so: my settings are for a maximum of 100 connections per torrent, with a global maximum of 200 connections. In my experience, I tend to average better downloads by having the extra capacity, it only causes problems when seeding and there are excessive connections. Azureus allowed me to set individual connections, so I would normally reduce that to 10 when files had completed downloading, but it became a pain doing that manually each time; to me it just seems like a good extra control to have.

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I think seeding torrents still need a reasonable amount of connections to allow certain concepts to work optimally (super seeding, optimistic unchoke (or something), etc).

IMHO this function should not be implemented because massive misuse (both abuse and misunderstood use) can be hurtful to the health of torrents.

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I think seeding torrents still need a reasonable amount of connections to allow certain concepts to work optimally (super seeding, optimistic unchoke (or something), etc).

Obviously, you need connections if you're the original seeder and I'm presuming that setting a torrent to Superseed would over-ride the feature I have suggested.

IMHO this function should not be implemented because massive misuse (both abuse and misunderstood use) can be hurtful to the health of torrents.

There are plenty of settings that can cause unintentional misuse, already, and to claim that this would adversely affect things is being short-sighted. Quite simply, someone could set the global/torrent connections to 10 if they were only seeding one torrent and, if they were abusing BT etiquette already, then they're probably the sort of person who would cancel a torrent as soon as they finished the download. To me, it makes more sense to limit the number of connections to a level which provides a reasonable service to those people who have made those connections; put it this way, does it make sense to have too many people connecting to you and impact your PC's ability to operate on the internet?

At the end of the day, this is all about flexibility and the setting could easily be set as disabled, upon installation of uTorrent, only being enabled by those people with a need for it.

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YenRug there are also a lot of settings you cannot adjust to prevent misuse. So it seems to be a valid reason in some cases. However thinking about it again this setting could be put in the advanced section where the average user doesn't tweak anything. Then this function could be implemented without a chance that it will be misused massively. Which is pretty much my only complaint.

I wouldn't even know what an optimal connections setting would be under which circumstances and therefore I'm just worried that people will start adjusting it not knowing what they are doing exactly. They could add it to the speed guide which would also put the masses in the right direction.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm a NuB at this and I have read the Guide and the FAQs and some of the forums, but I want to support uTorrent and be a good citizen uTorrently speaking.

So how long should I stay online say if I have 5, 170MB torrents and want to download one more, how long in terms of time should I stay online? I generally try to stay online for at least 6 hours, but I have sometimes left the computer on all night which can be a problem as I sleep in the same room as the computer....

Will I be penalized if I decide man, I don't want to sleep with the computer on because the last time I did that I really didn't get any sleep, and left the machine on for only 4 hours.

I am still trying to understand the ratio thing, and the downside of staying on too long.

Thanks in advance.

simsimsalabim

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Actually, I revise my opinion, even if connections per torrent could be set individually as low as 5 it should not cause any problems.

I don't think less than 5 connections per torrent would work well due to the severe problem µTorrent has holding onto firewalled (BitComet?) clients or worse trying to reconnect to unfirewalled clients if it is firewalled.

µTorrent does not immediately try to reconnect to lost seeds/peers from what I can tell. Sometimes it seems to not make an attempt at all until the tracker announce interval passes again!

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  • 1 month later...

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