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more priority options


callous

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i for one would find this quite useful. I tend to download big torrents (mostly tv shows) and its really hepfull to put highes priority on the begining and lowest at the end and watch as they download rather than waiting for the whole torrent to finish. Current options are good and helpfull but like its been said it depend on what peers anc offer and i must say i find myslef wanting more priority options at times

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The OP was asking for more than 3 priorities for torrents.

Similarly however the granularity of the picker when the priorities differ wouldn't help more with more levels. uT still tries to distribute rarer pieces first. If you want data in a specific order, set some to high/med/low the rest to do not download, and DON'T FORGET to unset skip before it finishes. corollary: sequential downloading of files won't be implemented, so don't ask :P

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it wouldn't be bad to add an advance option for seeding and also leeching on a single torrent. This way you can have it set up for high while downloading and low or normal while seeding it and not kill your overall band with or be a jerk by not seeding.

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jewelisheaven said: "4-10 slots?? People do that... I mean when they're not sole-seeding or on a 5+Mbit upload line?"

I'll do as high as 10 upload slots for 1 torrent if it's all I'm running besides a 'dead' torrent.

Typically I have it set to 4-6.

LOTS of Asian ips won't download from me faster than 5 KB/sec.

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  • 2 months later...

I'm sorry to bump an old thread, but I figured it would be better than creating a new one since it's the same thing.

I understand that the way Bit Torrent works, it's practically impossible to get specific pieces, so "in-order" downloading would be very inefficient and pointless, however I do share the opening poster's thoughts that a couple more priority options would be nice.

Allow me to give you a scenario - say you've got a big torrent of...TV shows (although it could be anything), it's going to take you weeks to download it, so you put the first few episodes on high priority and although it still might take a couple of days, at least you're not waiting weeks to begin watching it.

Currently, we sort of have to manually maintain the torrent. What I do is I put EVERYTHING on "low", then put all of the first series on medium, then the first couple of episodes on high. Then when they're downloaded, I put the next couple on high and so on and so forth.

As you can imagine, this is rather tedious and 2 or 3 extra priority levels would be much more helpful.

I could put the first few episodes on Highest, the next few on high, the next few on normal, the next series on low and the rest on lowest, saving me a lot of time and effort.

This is just an example, of course, and I understand it's a fairly specialised circumstance, but I can't imagine it's incredibly difficult to add to the program and I dare say a lot of people would find it very useful.

Anyway, thanks for at least considering it!

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Sequential downloading has been frequently rejected, and Switeck's signature has a link as to why.

Hmm, that was indeed a rather interesting link and I completely understand why people are so skeptical of the "priority" feature.

However, since the "prioritisation" of torrents already exists, would it really make a difference to have a few extra levels of priority (Keep in mind, I'm not asking to make anything have a higher priority than the current "high" priority, I'm simply asking for a few different levels of priority to help automate a task that I currently have to do manually)? In fact, wouldn't it improve the situation slightly?

I'm not an expert at all and I don't claim to be, so feel free to point out any flaws I have here, but if the problem with prioritisation is that it makes torrents "top heavy", as it were (where the first pieces are extremely common and the last pieces are not, potentially disappearing all together), then by having several layers of priority through the torrent, wouldn't it sort of "even" things out a bit more as the prioritised pieces are more spread out through the torrent?

Like I said, I could be completely wrong here and if I am, how about implimenting a feature where you have a few extra priority "slots", but the top 5% (arbitrary value) rarest pieces in a torrent still get the MAXIMUM priority? That way, people can prioritise the first few episodes of a TV series all they want, but uTorrent will still "prefer" the rarest pieces in the swarm?

I'm not trying to argue for the sake of it or disagree with what's been said just because I'd appreciate this feature, I'm simply trying to make suggestions that allow for it to be used without harming the swarm, so go easy on me, =P.

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  • 4 weeks later...

(And again it gets bumped, but I also thought it would be better to put it here to keep things together)

I'd like to see more priorities available for the same reason as neoKushan. With a slow internet connection it takes ages to download a TV series. Normally it is just a little annoying to reprioritize the episodes after 1 got finished. But on nightly downloads this is a little more annoying... So it would be nice to be able to prioritize the order of downloading the episodes better. Having a mechanism to download rare pieces together with the prioritized pieces seems to avoid the problems indicated on the page 'Switeck's link' is pointing to as neoKushan already stated.

Further more prioritizing is, in my opinion, not the only problem for disappearing parts/complete torrents. People who distribute their stuff using archives (like rar in most cases) help it too. Since I, for example, do not keep a rar-ed copy and a un-rar-ed copy of the file(s) and it might be clear which copy has to move...

Also the amount of different torrent for (almost) the same thing makes them to disappear... Since the seeds will be spread over these different copies instead of concentrating on one.

Putting lots of/too much stuff in 1 torrent makes it become incomplete faster. Espeacially if the total amount is multiple GBs big.

So giving prioritizing the blame for the problem seems a bit easy since it happens because of multiple reasons together.

(PS And maybe torrents disapearing is not a bad thing, since it is (or could be) a suppy and demand system)

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(Desperately) random piece selection and rarest first is 2 very key components that make BitTorrent as effective as it is. Remove either and torrent swarms may suffer. Remove both and they can fail a lot sooner than needed.

Torrents are just ideas, competing with other ideas for very limited bandwidth. They are made to die, their contents matter more than their method of sharing. But the goal is to get the torrent to as many people as want it in a reasonably short amount of time. And almost everything is secondary to that goal. This can even mean downloading quickly or in order is contrary to BitTorrent's overall goals.

But as harmful as different priorities may be, this pales in comparison to those who reduce their upload speed to 1 KiloBYTE/second...and then have the arrogance to complain bitterly that it is unfair that uTorrent v1.8 limited their download speed to 12 times that.

BitTorrent lives, breathes, and DIES by how well it can upload!

EXTREME care must be added when coming up with more complex priority options!

2 seeds, however fast they may be, are useless to each other.

2 peers, however fast they may be, are useless to each other if they have the same parts.

2 peers, however fast they may be, are useless to each other if they are both firewalled.

2 peers, however fast they may be, are useless to each other if they are not trying to download the same torrents.

Shall we add to this list?

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I cannot think of anything to add to the list. It seems rather complete to me (and very strict about the usefullness of peers). I totally agree that care must be taken when messing with these kind of things, in order to not disturb the protocol.

But things do not have to be extreme complicated I suppose. Guessing that an algoritm takes care of picking the (rare) pieces, it probarbly picks a random piece when no rare pieces are left/available. At this point it seems nice to replace the random picking by a prioritized picking. Also things like 'download first frame/piece' (for movies or cd images) could be implemented at this point.

Of course if the algoritm keeps deciding which piece is picked next, without using the random function. Things are much more complicated. If this is the case a sort of 'weight/preference' can be added to the pieces for the different priority options. Where a higher 'weight' combined with the 'rarity' makes the algorith to decide whether the piece gets picked or not. But this needs fine tuning of the values of the weight and how much it interferes with the current picking algoritm.

Maybe it is just more simple to only enable priorities for 'x+ seeds/peers' or 'y seeds/peers per 1MB of data'. Situations where pieces won't get lost easily.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Actually, I've been thinking a bit about this... and, the major issue is piece distribution, especially with rarest pieces...

While I would also like better control with priority levels, for the same watchable reasons, perhaps if we look at it backwards...

uTorrent already prioritizes the rarest pieces first... but currently, file priorities are taken into account, before the rarest piece is selected...

Perhaps, if uT looked at which pieces were rarest first... say, all of the pieces available from only 1 peer... and from that set of pieces, it selected which one to download based on the file priority that piece is involved in... in this manner, the file priority is secondary... the primary impact would still make sure the rarest pieces were preserved above all else...

Switching it around, greatly minimizes the chance of a torrent becoming top-heavy, since the file priority comes in after rarity is taken into account...

in fact, even without additional priority levels (*-est / medium-*), perhaps the current priority levels should work like this...

Holler if I haven't been clear on any of this... just finished driving 11 hours straight... am tired...

-- Smoovious

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