utorrent working ok but advice welcome :)

[jml666]

Hi everybody,

I've been using utorrent for 2 weeks now and I'm quite satisfied -> many thanks to the devs

I'm confused about a few things so I'd welcome a few advices to use it better.

I hope it's ok to ask several questions in 1 post

Here's my experience with utorrent on Vista: I installed 1.7.7 and downloaded like 40 torrents and looked what was happening. down speed up to 100 KB/s, up speed usually 40 KB/s, sometimes 50 KB/s, 5 torrents active. But after a few days I noticed that down speed was only 8-10 KB/s because the active torrents were slow to download (obviously the fast torrents had completed and only the slow ones remained) so I increased the number of active torrents to 8 total, 7 downloads.

Q1) I understand too many active torrents might be inefficient, but is there a way to monitor the overhead? Is it the "wasted" entry (general / transfer) minus hashfails?

My only real problem is with some torrents that cause many hashfails. They download slower and slower, and spend lots of time for the last few %. I don't understand what's utorrent doing with the last pieces: it would download each of them from different peers at 0.1kB/s, then hashfail 1 piece, then sometimes ban one or more peer, then discard the whole piece and start over. Is this some kind of heuristic because utorrent doesn't keep track of who sent what and so can't know which peer's responsible for the bad data?

Q2) I read that version 1.8 would deal better with hashfails, but then I'm OK with waiting longer for the torrents to complete, so should I risk running a non-release version? (I'm afraid to run into bugs...) Or should I take some action on these torrents?

Now say I completed a music torrent, open containing folder and play it. hum, ID3 tags are incorrect, I fix this. Oops, I just modified the files!

Q3) Will utorrent detect that, or will it send incorrect data when seeding? Can I get readonly files to prevent accidental overwrite?

Internet's slow with utorrent running. So when I need more speed I manually set globally bandwith upload limit to 30 KB/s, and later I put it back to "automatic". This is fine, but

Q4) Any easy way to momentarily shut down all traffic (while I'm downloading something)? I'd like to leave the utorrent window open to not forget to restart it. Limit to 0? Select all torrents and pause, and later start? (I'm not sure what are the consequences of that)

My internet connection has problems, I have to reboot the modem regularly. Meanwhile utorrent would have put every torrent in downloading status, and when internet's back, it would get bits of data for every one of them before focusing back on only the top torrents, thus creating files. It's not really important, but

Q5) any way to have utorrent autodetect that internet's down?

Thanks

[jewelisheaven]

Overloading your connection with more downloads makes them take LONGER. That may seem counterintuitive, but think about it this way. Your internet connection is like a river. How many boats can it handle? Dunno, but as more go on the river you see traffic jams and congestion. The same happens with your line. Speed Guide takes care of basics, so Follow the Setup Guide (Guides page link #3) and set the drop-down closest to your upload. Tweaking from there should only be done when you're trying to accomplish a specific goal. For example: On testing OpenOffice torrents and Slackware torrents you note that you can download @ 2Mbit. Great!! But you notice that when you're uploading too, that doesn't get to 50 KiBps even. So what you do is manually set your upload (changing by 10% at a time is a good rule of thumb).... until you can upload consistently, download near your max, AND not impact other internet activities. And that's only one configuration scenario.

If you want to stop uT temporarily, right click on the tray icon, and say pause all torrents Right click again to resume.

[yourpcguy]

your upload speed is the most important setting for getting good speeds.

i would enable encryption.

change your port if your speeds get bad.

>60000

utorrent does most of the work for you if you have it set right.

just set it and let it go.

i use private trackers so i dont have much trouble with hash fails.

look around.

ya youll have to copy the file to a diff dir to update the id3 tags.

[Firon]

Port number doesn't really make a difference, you know.

[jml666]

OK, thanks for all the advices

@jewelisheaven: oh, right click on tray icon, that's a good one

I experimented with limits to have no impact on other internet activities, and found that the threshold is quite lower than max (for upspeed mainly: 35, not 45, 22% less) so I'm still switching settings when leaving the computer alone

after the bad torrents finished downloading I reverted to only 5 torrents active, down speed OK, I'll see if the problem rises again...

also thanks for the link to the manual, I had missed it on the main page (it's printed very small in the download page!)

@yourpcguy: why encrypt my connection? It doesn't seem my ISP is throttling me. Or you mean just try it and see if it gets better? (I do get disconnected after several hours, I think I have a NAT issue with my router + my ISP is not very reliable in general)

yeah I'll look around someday but I thought private trackers would be found on the major torrent search engines (advertising for their community)? so I thought I'd join if I find I'm hitting private trackers on my searches (as opposed to actively searching private tracker sites)

[kieths]

Great ap! But I can think of something that might make it a tiny bit better.

Azureus - the resource heavy ap it is, makes the HASH copy-able with a simple click.

I use that a lot to seek alternate torrent sites for rare files. But on uTorrent, I have to manually type the HASH. Clicking on the HASH doesn't copy it, and I can't even select and copy / paste it. I think a click to copy HASH would be really helpful, to me at least.

[jewelisheaven]

In the General tab, all selectable fields can be copied. Right click on them.