Improving the length of time that files are seeded

[lostcowboy]

Why do files become unseeded? in utorrent you can setup your seeding limits by ratio, and/or time, and after that you can ether stop seeding or continue to seed at a slower rate, the default is 2KBs per file. But still files become unseeded, why? There comes a time when even though you are seeding at 2KBs per file most of your upload is going to your seeds. At this point in order to have a good bittorrent download, you have to free up some upload bandwidth to the file you are leaching. It turns out that you were the last seed for that file and so that file becomes unseeded.

Here is my suggestion look at utorrent as three sections, leaching section, seeding section and slow seeding section. I believe in order for this to work there would have to be some programing changes to the tracker program also.

utorrent client

leaching section, would use half of the upload speed.

seeding section would use one third of the upload speed.

slow seeding section would use the rest of the speed only if necessary.

Here is how the slow seeding section would work. once a file has been seeded to the ratio/time set in the seeding section the file becomes a slow seed file, it would only be seeded if the tracker program could not find a seed for that file. In this case and only this case my utorrent client would start to seed to only one client at a time a chunk of the file. I would have many files in the slow seeder section, and so there would likely be a queue of different file chunks being rotated for different files/trackers. I would set the total amount of bandwidth to be used for slow seeding, 2KBs, 4KBs, whatever.

The job of the tracker program would be to try to connect to as many of the last recent seeders as possible to provide as much bandwidth as possible. As soon as the swarm has a new seed, the old seeds would no longer be required. By setting the bandwidth for the slow seeder section, I would not have to stop providing support for the old seeds.

As it is now, I have some times been connected to a lone seed that has uploaded to me at less than 1KBs, and then I have supplied the rest of the swarm.

[jewelisheaven]

? There is no way to ensure you are using the maximum upload. Prioritizing is the best you can hope for. The default is 4, so as to not trigger any download limiting behaviour btw, you're wrong. Slow seeding? You are seeding or you're not. uT's queue allows you to keep files actively polling/reporting to the tracker without transferring data. If you're not applying your upload effectively with less files, how do you think putting more files active will help?

[lostcowboy]

Hello jewelisheaven, sorry that you misunderstood me, even though I am from the US, my grammar is not that good. I understand that it is best to let utorrent manage the speed up to the limit that I set. In Utorrent preference settings under queueing you can see the settings for leaching and seeding, You can see that it is already setup in three sections. I am not suggesting any changes to section one or two. But section three, if you have it check-marked provides for contentious seeding after the normal seeding ratio/time limit has been set, if you have a speed of zero the seeding stops. any other number means that seeding will continue at a slower speed. This setting is on a per torrent file setting. I would like for it to be changed to a kind of group setting. All files that you have completed normal seeding ratio/time limits would fall in to that group, unless you stopped them. Example I have a 96 KBs upload, I give utorrent 80KBs of that. I have section three enabled at say 10KBs per torrent file, as I continue to get files, I will go through a cycle of leaching, normal seeding, and slow seeding at 10KBs per torrent file. Soon most of my 8oKBs of upload would be going to the slow seeding torrents. Also most of my connections would be going to them. There will come a time when I will have to start, stopping the slow seeds. I believe this is one of the reasons that swarms die.

One of the sayings of people that use emule, is that while you can get things fast on bittorrent, you can't get rare files on it because the swarms die. While that may be true now. I don't believe it has to be that way.

I believe with a small change to utorrent, so that setting is a group setting, and let utorrent control how many connections are used for the slow seeds, we can maintain rare files with utorrent.

I also believe that it will take programing changes to the bittorrent trackers, so that they can recontact the last seeds, to see if they are willing to start slow seeding.

The way I see it at present I can seed maybe 10 files tops. I think with this change I would be able to reseed 100 files or more on a rotating bases.

[jewelisheaven]

Ah-ha, yes the slight change in that behaviour is already on the TODO... I think? Where people regularly use specific settings for "groups" of torrents, the idea has been that these types of manual settings can be put in use on a per-label basis, whereby if you have added a torrent with label "1" (default high priority, 30 KiB Down limit, 12 KiB Up limit, .8 ratio & 36 hours), label "2" (default low priority, 0 down Limit, 30 up Limit, 1.5 ratio & 12 hours) -- these settings can be auto-applied to the torrent so one doesn't have to choose it every time.

As far as expecting changes to trackers... trackers don't really care if a peer is downloading or seeding. They just hand out a # of peers when requested and keep track of these peer information for various INFOHASHes to facilitate the clients connecting to eachother.

[lostcowboy]

Hi jewelisheaven, I can see that we are still talking about different things, but what you are talking about is interesting also. I haven't used the labels at all yet. Question can torrents be moved between labels, or are you stuck with the label you put the torrent into when you started it. If so it would be neat to be able to shift a torrent from label 1 or label 2, to label 3, when at the end of normal seeding. The label 3 could be set up for very low priority, only seed one at a time. If I remember right utorrent can determine which of the torrents need to be seeded most. Once the torrent has say two seeds, you could stop seeding it, and go to the next torrent which is desperate for a seed.