Query about ever increasing block (piece) size?

[gaju123]

Well its not a problem I think, just that I am finding that the more I am using uTorrent, the more the block size in the pieces tab seem to be increasing. Initially it used to be about 128k, then 256k and now 4MBs per piece.....

This is getting a bit annoying because its causing smaller files to take greatly increasing time to download.. What exactly is causing this to increase and how can I make them smaller again?

Thanks in advance for your help

[Switeck]

That's just what OTHER people are creating their torrents under. They set piece size to higher and higher amounts (such as 4 MB)...and there's nothing you can do.

There is actually a limitation in µTorrent and a few other BitTorrent clients that they cannot handle a torrent with extremely many pieces. Whether the max number of pieces is ~65,000 or more I don't recall. A sign of a torrent with this problem is the .torrent file itself is well over 1 MB in size.

A balance is needed in creating torrents -- low piece size so people can get something (however small) to share with others quicker and small total .torrent size -- both to prevent long .torrent downloads and to reduce the bandwidth overhead of all the available pieces between seeds, peers, and trackers.

[gaju123]

Ok, that helped a bunch... Thanks for the quick response.. Not a earth shattering query I know but still had to be asked for my curiosity

[Switeck]

Hopefully, this means when/if you create torrents of your own that you won't use 4 MB piece size for <100 meg torrents...or 128k piece size for 2+ GB torrents. There is a balance between the 2...but there's plenty of leeway.