Seeds/Peers question

[kyron]

in the client's table of active torrents, both the seeds & peers use a xx(xxx) format. what is the difference between the two values (the one in parenthesis, the one outside).

thanks

[Smoovious]

the one outside are the ones you're actively communicating with

the one inside are the counts retrieved from a scrape (or announce) about the total # participating on the swarm.

Just because, for example, you have 0(332), doesn't mean you have all 332 peers from the tracker. The tracker will only give you a limited subset of the total, if the total is higher than the tracker is set to give out at a time.

Along those lines, also look in the General tab.

9 of 18 connected (17 in swarm)

That means you are currently connected to 9... you have connected to and verified a total of 18 unique peers during the run... the tracker(s) are reporting 17 peers in the swarm.

(the # in swarm is only from tracker scrapes. Peers retrieved via DHT are shown in the DHT section of the page, which may be included in the 9 of 18 in the example above, once you've connected to one of them)

-- Smoovious

[kyron]

i see... thank you.

the reason i asked is because i see there are seeds available (according to the tracker, the in-parenthesis), but im not connected to them. trying to figure out why or how to improve the connections. would that be tweaking my UT, or more related to the provider of the tracker?

i also note that my General table reports DHT Status as "not available".

kyron

[Switeck]

Fake torrents often report lots of seeds that are unconnectable. Even when connecting to all the peers, you won't see an availability above 1.

[Smoovious]

The seeds are more than likely already too busy to take additional connections. Since most everyone seems to go ape-shit about connecting to a seed when it isn't necessary, the seeders end up getting tied up more than the peers.

Another possibility are the seeders super-seeding, in which case they would show up as a normal peer when you're connected to them. If there are many seeders, however, it is doubtful they'll all be super-seeding. (super-seeding isn't really necessary in any event)

The third possibility, Switeck already touched on. The torrent would have to be investigated more to determine if that is the case or not. As long as you're still connecting to peers, and getting good pieces from them, and the availability column shows a value of 1.000 or higher, don't worry about seeds. The swarm would already have a full copy.

-- Smoovious

[kyron]

interesting. yeah the cases i had in mind where when i see a couple seeds & couple peers listed for something, but im sitting on a big goose egg for download speed.

[Switeck]

If you see many peers with more than 60% of the torrent, especially if there's 80+% peers...and you still don't top 1.0 availability...it's almost certainly a fake!