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Newbie Queueing Question


scratchie

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Greetings all;

I've been a sporadic BitTorrent user for several years now but I've just discovered utorrent. I don't know what took me so long!

I don't actually have any speed problems, per se, but this forum seems like the right place for a question on queueing. Please redirect me if that's not the case.

My DSL line is about 128kbps upload. The default setting for this speed is to only allow one torrent to upload or download at a time.

I'm wondering if I'm opening myself up for any unforeseen problems if I raise my limits slightly. I'm not trying to run ten downloads at a time or anything like that, but here's what I'm thinking:

Scenario A: I have a large download that's going to take a day or more to complete, but it's downloading pretty quickly and I don't want to stop it. I download a torrent file for a small download and bump it to the top of my queue, but it's downloading very slowly (maybe there's only one seed, or something like that).

In this case, I'd like to keep downloading the slow torrent (so the seeder sees it as active and doesn't shut it down), but I'd like to continue with the faster, larger download as well. Any potential downside to bumping my queue limit up to two downloads?

Scenario B: I have one or two torrents downloading, but I'd like to allow some of my completed downloads to seed, as well. Since I have a relatively slow DSL connection, if I just left the queue settings at the default, I'd almost always be downloading something and almost never seeding. So I bump my "active torrent" limit so it's 1 or 2 higher than my "active download" limit. Again, I'm wondering if there is any potential downside to doing this.

What do you think? Thanks in advance.

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It is important that EACH upload slot on EACH torrent can average at least 1 KiloBYTE/sec. Any less, and connection overheads may go from <5% of the data transferred to potentially 25+%. You may even be able to upload slightly faster than the default value of 9 KiloBYTES/sec for the xx/128k setting -- though I doubt you'll be able to use more than 14 KiloBYTES/sec upload speed even when ONLY seeding a single torrent. This is why speed tests help find out if you're really getting the full upload amount or not -- you get to know what the ragged edge of disaster is. :) ("ragged edge of disaster" is the point where uploading goes from a consistent upload speed flat line to a saw-tooth/ocean wave.)

So as number of torrents increase, upload slots per torrent needs to decrease slightly. This should balance because you have "use additional upload slots if <90% upload speed" checked.

Also, there's advanced settings that cause torrents to be seeded in preference to downloading MORE torrents. ...As well as seed goals. You can even run Scheduler in seed-only mode for a few hours, though it will only be 'seed-only' for whatever torrent is active...not changing which torrent is running as far as I know. So much of that can be automated.

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Thanks for the reply. Let me see if I understand everything.

By "upload slot", thats mean one upload connection with one peer, right? So I'm aiming to have each peer who downloads from me achieve a speed of at least 1 kB/sec?

If I look at my "Speed" tab, it appear that the upload graph is mostly a straight line, so that seems good. (Am I correct in thinking that this is for all torrents? It doesn't seem to change if I select different torrents in the top pane.)

So as number of torrents increase, upload slots per torrent needs to decrease slightly. This should balance because you have "use additional upload slots if <90% upload speed" checked.

So if I'm going to increase the number of allowable torrents (right now I have it set at 3 total/2 download), should I reduce the number of upload slots to 2 per torrent?

Looking at my "Peers" pane for some torrents, I see that some peers are getting less than 1 kB/sec. So it seems like I do need to reduce the number of upload slots. Does that sound right?

Conversely, I see in the advanced section that there are two settings that allow you to ignore slow uploads or downloads when determining which torrents to activate from the queue. Would I be better off lowering the total number of allowable torrents and setting these two settings to "true"?

Also, there's advanced settings that cause torrents to be seeded in preference to downloading MORE torrents. ...As well as seed goals.

Are you referring to prio_no_seeds and use_seed_peer_ratio? It doesn't look like those will really do what I'm looking for, because they're based on how many other seeds are out there. So if I'm looking to improve my own dl ratio at a particular torrent site, this won't help me if the torrent I'm seeding has a lot of other seeders. What I'm looking to do is to seed it in addition to the torrent(s) I'm downloading, but without turning off the downloads altogether.

Thanks for your help.

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Yes, an upload slot represents uploading to ONE peer on a torrent at a time. It often swaps around if there's many peers uploading back to it AND it is using fewer upload slots that peers giving it download speed.

The Speed Window/Tab graphs are for ALL active torrents combined.

Yes, as number of torrents increase, upload slots per torrent needs to decrease slightly.

Your connection is too slow to manage 3 torrents at once, unless 2 of them are basically dead. But yes, to try to keep upload speed per slot high(er), reduce the number of upload slots to 2 per torrent.

It's ok if sometimes peers are getting less than 1 KiloBYTE/sec. But that should not always be the case.

Yes, you should be better off lowering the total number of allowable torrents and setting the ignore slow uploads or downloads settings to "true". Do note that µTorrent considers anything at or below 1 KiloBYTE/sec as "slow". That's hard-coded, you can't adjust that limit.

"there's advanced settings that cause torrents to be seeded in preference to downloading MORE torrents"

I guess they removed that feature under advanced...try the QUEUEING tab under Preferences.

You'll also want to set Seed While so it "finishes" a torrent and stops it (using speed 0 for "When µTorrent reaches seeding goal" underneath.)

My advice, don't bother setting the seeding goal higher than 110 (110%) -- and if you spot a torrent you've already downloaded that's over 40% uploaded (ratio 0.400) that has a lot of seeds then it's probably ok to stop it.

Your upload speed is simply too low to spread thin between more than about 2 "decent" torrents at once.

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