Make upload speed equal to download speed

[vtol]

fair enough that you have a different point of view, just what does it help to derail the discussion by getting sarcastic?

I would usually go up to 1:2 dl/ul ratio, what else do you expect to help that poor torrent, 1:10, seed like forever, to be the fool for those who pull out immediately upon completion of their download?

you are trying to make a difference between capping/stopping/throttling the torrent when it has reached the seeding goal and prior to that event. whilst you completely ignoring that the seeding goal can and actually is manipulated. that is why torrents starve in the first place, because a lot of peers would not feed back to even an 1:1 ratio but pull out as soon as their download is completed.

I stand my ground that there is no starvation spiral if the ul/dl speed would be balanced but that such spiral is caused by peers not feeding back a sufficient amount of data to keep the torrent alive. but that is likely the fate of any torrent died so far.

balancing the speed would just slow the torrent to the average speed (amongst all peers). the more fast peers the faster the torrent, the more slow peers the slower the torrent.

the link you mentioned is pointing to sequential downloading and chocking, I don't really see the relevance to speed balancing, pardon my ignorance

[Switeck]

A seeder's ratio only tells about PAST history, not the current state of the torrent swarm.

Seq. DLing by many participants can draw 10 TIMES the size of the torrent out of a seeder and still not leave another virtual copy anywhere. That almost by itself is why initial seeding even exists.

There are others besides hit-and-runners that can cause torrent swarm problems -- hostile ISPs that disrupt/throttle/corrupt BitTorrent traffic, hopelessly firewalled peers/seeds, peers/seeds that constantly disconnect/reconnect, and peers with media indexers running that silently edit audio/video file MP3 tags.

If a torrent needs seeds, it needs seeds regardless of your pet ratio or how fast you upload.

There's a "sweet spot" for average upload speed per upload slot -- if you get (far) outside of it, EXPECT YOUR DOWNLOAD SPEEDS TO DROP LIKE A BRICK.

That "sweet spot" is roughly 3-10 KiloBYTES/second. Send any slower to other peers, and they'll find faster peers to upload to...and you end up getting nearly nothing. Send slower than ~0.5 KB/sec and they'll even snub you -- at that point you'll probably get nothing from those peers. Send faster than 10 KB/sec and few peers will return the favor at that speed or faster. Most peers/seeds are on ADSL or cable ISPs, which give maybe 100 KiloBYTES/second upload max. (It is rare for ADSL to get more.) Because they too probably have multiple upload slots, their limited upload speed gets split too many ways to maintain >10 KB/sec to any 1 peer.

Of course if you're in a torrent swarm that has lots of seedboxes running on 100 mbit/sec fiber optic lines, you'll see better results...but most public torrent swarms are not so lucky.