Throttling download rate kills upload rate too

[periscope]

With my ISP plan, I prefer to do most of my downloading at a certain time of the day. At other times, ideally, I throttle the naturally fast downloads way back to, say, 1 or 2 Kb/s and spend the time seeding. This allows me to catch up on my share ratio and does not incur much downstream usage.

However, when I limit uTorrent's downsteam rate for individual torrents (right-click / properties / maximum download rate...) I find that this also virtually kills the upstream rate at the same time. This happens even when I've got a large percentage of the file, and seems to be the same for large and small swarms. It seems to be the same with Azureus too. Yet, it is not consistent. One minute I've got nothing going out, the next it's boogying when one or two peers seem to find me.

It's very frustrating as I could be seeding happily all the time, but a lot of my upstream bandwidth is going to waste.

When downloading at unlimited speed, I seem to achieve upstream rates as high as my connection will allow.

What's going on? Is it because others in the swarm have already got what I've got and I'm not downloading new pieces that are in demand?

[Firon]

Download limiting doesn't work too well, as it -also- chokes BT communication due to the way it works, resulting in your upload dying too.

If you wanna just "seed" partially completed torrents, you can try skipping all the files temporarily.

[periscope]

Nice idea about skipping the files temporarily Firon. I tried it, but unfortunately it still results in a significant down speed for some reason. Perhaps it's the communication needs, as you say, but it's hard to believe the machine chatter needs so much bandwidth. It's more than the whole margin I allocate to overhead when leeching six torrents with, say, 500 connections.

For example, following your idea, I'm getting an average of about 9 KB/s down on a torrent that's (sharing bandwidth with others and) going up at about 13! Makes no sense to have that much coming in when I've skipped the files and am supposedly downloading nothing! Looks like I'll have to go back to limiting the down speed, which on the same torrent yields 1 KB/s down, and anything from 0 to 13 up (highly variable).

Cheers.

[Firon]

It'll use a bunch of down speed for a bit, but once it reaches 100%, it'll just "seed."

[periscope]

Aha! You're absolutely right Firon. It started out as about 98% complete (why not 100 I have no idea), downloaded madly, then once it hit 100% settled into nice seeding behaviour with close to no downstream.

That should be a decent work-around for me in future, so thanks very much indeed.

[telflonmail]

periscope,

The reason it's still downloading when you set all files to "Don't Download" is because it is trying to complete all incomplete parts.

I sometime use this feature (or quirk) to do a forced hash on a torrent. But, when you do a forced hash test, it will clear all incomplete parts. So, in order to complete a forced hash test without losing (what could be many MBs), I would set all files to "Don't Download". It would then continue to download blocks for the incomplete parts until all parts are complete. [No new parts would be started.] Then, I would do the forced hash test without losing precious MBs....

[periscope]

OK - makes sense now telflonmail. I thought it had to be something vaguely like that...

Thanks for enlightening me.

[Moeziz]

Bit of a slow reply but: http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#How_can_I_make_.C2.B5Torrent_go_into_a_seed-only_mode_on_all_torrents.3F

I'm curious though - how exactly does this work? I started a partially complete torrent while the scheduler was active, showing the red "seed-only mode" boxes in the scheduler settings, yet the torrent started to download data.

Perhaps I needed to wait until it finished the bits that were queued to download, as it had been stopped prior to then.

Any ideas?

*Waves at Firon*

[Firon]

I believe it needs to finish pieces that are still in progress.