(a lot of) Questions

[Bayz0r]

Hi all,

So I've been using uTorrent and torrents in general for about 3 months now, and I've had a quite a few questions piling up. I'm going to list them here in hopefully somewhat of an orderly fashion.

1. Why out of the dozens or hundreds of peers or seeds in swarm, I only end up connecting (ie actually downloading) from 8-10 per torrent (I'm not saying it is capped at 10, but I certainly never connect to 100). If the issue has to do with patching my TCPIP.sys, I have already done that, and that number is set at 150.

2. My download speeds have dropped considerably over the past few days, hardly ever exceeding 50KB/s on any given torrent. I have however ran a test in downloading Open Office, and the speed there is 250KB/s constant. Is it then just a question of bad luck in the seeds/peers? Or is it possible that some trackers are throttling me for having a rather crappy ratio? (the reason for the bad ratio is that I've been terribly short on disk space up to a week ago, limited to a 40GB HDD, so I couldn't afford to keep stuff around after completion).

2b. If indeed I am being throttled, does restoring my ratios work to solve the problem and if so how long would that normally take? (note that I have the same sluggish speed from any number of different trackers that I try, or so it would seem).

3. Why are my downloads and uploads working fine (in the conditions described above) even when the usually green tick at the bottom is red. Yes, while it's red and says people will not be able to connect to me, I still upload at my max upload speed. (fyi, I hardly ever get a red mark, but I was just curious).

4. I am wondering what is the way that everyone here runs their torrents that they are seeding. The way I see it, seeding to a good ratio on a lot of torrents isn't really easy to do. In my case, my upload speed is limited to 40KB/s, and I download any number between 2 and 8 torrents at the same time. Needless to say, on completion, they turn into 2-8 seeding torrents, added on top of whatever else I had seeding, so I end up seeding 15-20 torrents. On top of that, some upload speed is "wasted" on the torrents I am a peer on, so what happens is I have my 40KB/s upload speed chopped up into little 2-3KB/s uploads dripping onto others. This is frustrating in that it takes a very very long time for any one large torrent to reach at least a ratio of 1.5.

I was wondering how other people here manage their seeding torrents. Do you only seed one or so at a time until it reaches a good ratio, then stop it and seed another?

~~~

My connection information and my uTorrent settings:

Connection: 4mbps up/512kbps down (max). DSLreports speed tests give a constant reading of at least 2,6mbps down and 450kbps up.

My uTorrent upload speed is limited to 40KB/s, and the other settings selected accordingly.

I'd like to apologize in advance for any terminological mix-ups I may have committed, but I am rather unexperienced (yes I have read the guides and I have searched for my questions).

Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to answer.

[DreadWingKnight]

1> It's not practical, nor is it recommended to connect to everyone.

2> It's the health of the swarms for the torrents you're choosing considering that OOo maxes you out.

3> http://bt.degreez.net/firewalled.html

4> Too many torrents at once.

[Bayz0r]

1> It's not practical, nor is it recommended to connect to everyone.

2> It's the health of the swarms for the torrents you're choosing considering that OOo maxes you out.

3> http://bt.degreez.net/firewalled.html

4> Too many torrents at once.

Thanks for the reply. As to 1, I was also wondering why it says "connected to 5 of 38 (120 in swarm). As in, why did it only choose 38 out of the 120, and why out of those 38, it only connects to 5. Also, based on what does it choose the peers in the swarm to connect to, since obviously it doesn't connect to all of them.

I now understand about being firewalled. However, I don't understand why my port would alternate between being closed and open, without any change from my side. For the record, it shows open for 95% of the time.

I forgot to mention in my initial post that I am connecting through a DL-604 router.

Thanks for the reply

[Ultima]

120 was reported by the tracker, 38 is how many peers µTorrent actually has in its peer list. It picks peers randomly and attempts to connect to them if µTorrent is below its connection limit. It won't connect unless the peer on the other side accepts the connection, so even if connecting to everyone were a good thing (which it isn't), not being able to connect to everyone isn't something µTorrent could do anything about.

[Bayz0r]

Ah, that makes things a lot more clear. It begs one more question from me though. If, let's say, I am 35 connections under the limit, and I start a torrent, it will pick 35 random peers/seeds to connect to. Some of them, as you have said, it won't be able to connect to because they won't accept the connection. Does µTorrent discard those peers it was not able to connect to and pick others to fill up to the maximum number connections limit? Does it do this whenever the trackers are updated? Does it keep track of which peers it wasn't able to connect to at first so as to exclude them from the next random batch?

Sorry if I'm asking too much, I am just curious

One of my mother questions had gone unanswered, I was hoping maybe someone can help answer. If indeed a tracker throttles me for having a bad ratio, what is the length of this restriction, and how can it be undone? I realize this might depend on the trackers, but I was looking for a general type of answer.

[Ultima]

Trackers don't/can't throttle you. They can ban/block you from accessing them. As you said, it depends on the tracker, and the only way you can figure that out is by asking the tracker administrators/moderators.

As for the connection thing... If µTorrent doesn't connect, it'll try other peers. I said it was random, but it doesn't pick a random batch every time, it's just that the peer list isn't sorted in any particular fashion, and it goes through the list one by one.