general torrent swarm question

[theant]

Hiya everyone:

I was wondering if anyone out there had some good places to look for the understanding of Bittorrent swarms. Typical activity, how the bittorrent protocal works. Stuff like that.

I do have a specific question that someone may be able to explain, but I'm quite willing to stuff my head full of knowledge in an effort to discover for myself.

Anyone know why some swarms (I've noticed this on different trackers and with differnt clients) have a speed rollor coaster going on? My torrents usually take a bit to get going... I'm assuming this is because it takes a while to connect to enough clients to get a good speed going. But some torrents will then slow back down drasticially, hang arround a middle-low speed, then ramp back up to a high speed for a minute or two before going back to a lower speed. During this whole time my upload speed has stayed pretty constant.

- a note of intrest: my mid-low download speed is almost exactly my upload speed.

Lately almost all of the torrents I have tried have an inherent 1:1 seeding ratio casue I don't download faster then I upload. This is kinda strange since I have an asyncronous DSL connection.

-The ANT

[Firon]

http://www.bittorrent.com/FAQ.html

http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/1.html

http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#Why_are_my_torrents_going_so_slow.3F

[theant]

Thanks Firon : have read some of those, will be reading the rest.

I did check out the speed problems area of the utorrent forums also, tried the stuff they suggested. Helped some:

By the way, my AV was a killer for UT, got that problem fixed at least. Just one of the reasons Forums and user input are one of the best things in the world!

-The ANT