Number of peers keep rising

[bitbastard]

The problem is the number of peers in my torrents keep rising.

I'm on a private tracker, after a while the number of peers simply keep increasing.

DHT/Local Peer Discovery/Peer Exchange all disabled

Utorrent reports 30 peers, according to the tracker/website there are 5.

Shutting down and restarting Utorrent clears this up and resets the number of peers to 5.

...and then it starts to rise again.

It's happening on all torrents from this tracker.

This only happened since upgrading to 1.8.

I'm running a PIII/600 with 640MB and a 40GB drive

uTorrent 1.8 (build 1183) on port 119 green light on network

net.max_halfopen set to 40 (I'm using the tcp patch set to 50)

Upload Limit 60

Upload slots 11

Connection/torrent 85

Connections/global 400

Max active torrents 4

Max active downloads 4

Encryption is forced

because of a cache problem (now resolved):

diskio.sparse_files false

Avast antivir

Commodo Firewall Pro

TeaTimer from spybot S&D

Peerguardian2

I'm using Windows' pppoe connection with Multilink framing on.

That's to avoid throttling issues with my ISP.

My connection is 5Mbps/800Kbps

Was working fine with 1.7.7

Logfile of Trend Micro HijackThis v2.0.2

Scan saved at 10:47:27 PM, on 20/08/2008

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MSIE: Internet Explorer v7.00 (7.00.6000.16705)

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--

End of file - 11358 bytes

[Switeck]

Your settings are a little extreme.

You need a pretty good reason to increase net.max_halfopen beyond its default of 8, especially if you're not firewalled. Too many things (network-wise) CAN go wrong at high half open limits.

Upload slots set to 11 is too many for running 4 torrents at once. That's 44 total upload slots potentially...but your upload speed is only 60 KiloBYTES/second. So that means you're only going to average 1.36 KiloBYTES/second per peer you're uploading to.

5 upload slots per torrent seems a better value.

[bitbastard]

Those settings are based on a guide @torrentfreak to maximise network usage.

I now seed at max capacity. Before I would have trouble with clients being too slow an not always maxing my UL speed.

[Switeck]

I've read the guides at torrentfreak.

In the OLD guide dated June 26, 2006, the calculation of upload slots:

1 + (upload speed / 6)

...assumes you're only running 1 or 2 torrents.

You're set up to run 4 at once, so upload slots needs to be lower.

The newer guide on March 19, 2007 points to this:

http://infinite-source.de/az/az-calc.html

The newest guide (on August 05, 2008) points to the az-calc link and this as well:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=34259

...MY guide.

[bitbastard]

I'll give those a look thanks.

It does not however solve the original problem does it?

[thelittlefire]

... what problem? Did you copy the list to SEE what these "extra" IPs are?

[Switeck]

Can you copy and paste the Peer List? (from the Peer tab, right-mouse-click, choose Copy Peer List, paste in notepad or wordpad.)

See if there's any duplicate numbers.

With only 30 total, it shouldn't take very long to spot repeats.

[bitbastard]

I checked the peer list, no dupes.

I changed my number of slots to 5.

I also:

zapped the %appdata%\utorrent directory and started from scratch.

That seems to have done the trick.

The seeds, peers columns are still inaccurate but not as much.

They simply seem to lag behind the tracker. Which I take to be normal.

Currently I'm seeing 127/9 110/6 115/7 on the tracker and 129/11 113/12 114/7 on utorrent a definite improvement.

[thelittlefire]

If peercount increases on a private torrent, those peers are from the tracker... wiping settings would not change that in the slightest.

[bitbastard]

Agreed,

I thought the problem was resolved. Now I'm not so sure.

Currently I'm seeing the following:

On the tracker: 110/8 240/4 159/8

on utorrent: 116/46 240/65 159/14

Interestingly the first two are from the 21st the last from yesterday (22).

I looked at the peerlist, no dups I could spot.

Any thoughts?

EDIT @ 3:00pm

Just a quick update:

On the tracker: 109/7 220/6 156/9

On utorrent : 108/49 221/70 161/12