understanding/patient helper wanted!

[smudger]

Hi - hope this is in the right place, if not i apologize in advance! I am a complete newbie and have been reading all the faq's etc for the past hour. I was directed to utorrent from a games site and i am trying to understand what it is and what it does! Basically i am using it to download a game of 3.38GB but it has been doing this for about 45 minutes and it says 4.8 per cent done - is that normal? It will take ages at this rate - i have checked all the common reasons, like the port thingy etc - the download speed results came back as 1868 kb/s and upload 191 kb/s - is that good or bad? It says seeds 11 peers 42 - again i have no idea what that means!

Can anyone help in very plain, very simple language - as you may of gathered unfortunately i am not very computer savey either! But i am willing to learn!

I am running windows xp sp3, have broadband connection with Virgin/ntl and am a nice person kind to animals and old people!!

thanks alot in advance

smudger

[Switeck]

Since your upload was measured as 191 kilobits/second, try the 192 kilobits/second max upload settings values found on my chart in the 2nd link of my signature. There is some rounding down on upload speed, so it shouldn't overload your connection.

If you have a router, you may be able to use UPnP (already enabled) in uTorrent to get a green light...but if that fails to work, you'll need to manually port-forward the router to your computer's LAN ip address (usually something like 192.168.1.101).

4.8% done in 45 minutes on a 3.38GB torrent is over 60 KiloBYTES/second sustained for the whole 45 minutes...that's a LOT more than you're uploading to others in the same time! BitTorrent works by people sharing the parts they have with each other so all can complete the download without the few people at 100% complete having to do all the work.

[Clairebug]

Your download speed, once you have satisfied yourself that you have set you speed right in preferences and have an open port is determined by those over whom you have no control. If there are 11 seeds, that means your are trying to download from those people out of a total of 42 people who may have part of the entire file you are trying to get. Whether you get anything at all from the current handful of 11 copies of the file depends on the speed at which those people are letting you download - i.e. their settings. When you look at the list of peers in the lower pane, you can see how much they have in terms of percentage. You can also see how much you are downloading from each one of them. And how much you are uploading to those in the swarm (that group of 42) and how fast you are uploading to them. My ideal download is one that uploads almost as fast as it downloads, so that in the time it takes me to download something I will have enabled at least a couple more folks to get a full copy.

All that being said, however, there are so many variables that you can control and should look to them first. Make sure you follow the speed guide and remember that the speed you are entering is your UPLOAD speed. You can figure out your max upload by taking your speed test value, dividing by 8 and then calculating 75-80 percent of that. You don't want so much of your computer resources going to uploading that your download slows to a crawl. So check your speed setting.

Then, check to see if your port is forwarded. Its a simple test - a big clue that you are not connectable is that dread yellow triangle, but mine tends to turn on whenever my torrents are all idle. I know I am connectable - but you may not be so check. Also, pay close attention to the recommended numbers for downloads, pers and global connections. Good luck. Be patient, let it download overnight if you can.

One other thing I may mention - in case you don't know this. Certain (private) trackers prohibit the use of DHT. If you need to learn what that is, keep reading your material! This means that you are not able to use DHT to locate seeds even if you are using a public tracker. However, those folks may not be so restricted, and may have enabled DHT. Sometimes, you will never see a complete copy of a torrent but you will keep downloading because someone has discovered a complete copy through DHT. In that case, you will see whole bunch of people with the same percentage completed, but you will not see that one person who has 100%. I see this so often that I have learned to just say, hmmm, when I see this condition, and I just caution myself to be patient.

One last observation - that game is pretty large. I download a lot of torrents where the data runs between 300 and 600 mb and they take quite a while. Something as large as 3.38g with few seeds uploading fast could take a long time. Long long time!

Check into the IRC - lots of friendly folks there to help! And the help there is instant.

ETA: Switeck posted while I was writing my epic reply...he wrote the speed guide. Listen to the man!

[chadrew]

Simply put, there are 11 seeds (the ones that have the full file and are uploading) and 42 peers (the ones that don't have the full file and are downloading/uploading). There are much more peers here, that's why you might get lower speeds. Just be patient and it will complete eventually.