Infrequent/Spotty peer connection on torrent I created

[orriblepox]

I created a torrent earlier today that has been showing peers all day, but has connected to only two-- one is the mysterious planetlab group using a fake copy of Uttorent, which has been connected for several hours now, and the other connects, downloads a few kbs of data, and is gone in an instant.

This happens maybe once or twice an hour. I'm currently showing 4 peers, however, so I don't understand why my Utorrent isn't connecting to those. I understand that the tracker reporting is inaccurate, but since these particular set of peers have been with me for most of they day, I'm wondering if there's something on my end that's keeping them from connecting.

Other torrents I'm seeding at the moment are doing quite well. One of them has been seeding constantly since I opened UT, and, with enough peers, easily reaches the cap speed of 40 kB.

My port is forwarded correctly, I have encryption set to Enabled and am allowing Legacy connections, and I'm allowing 8 upload slots per torrent, which shouldn't be the issue since the torrents I'm seeding are obscure and don't get much traffic.

Speed test Up/Down speeds are 3194 KB/2263 KB, respectively. Apparently the upload speed may be inaccurate, since my ISP did some upload compression partway through it. My max upload rate is set to 70.

Downloads work normally. I did a quick test using one of the Open office torrents and it was going at 100+ a second before I closed it down.

Any thoughts?

EDIT: ISP is Comcast. Forgot to add that before.

[Switeck]

To fight the disruptions,

DISABLE: UPnP, NAT-PMP LPD, DHT (both kinds!), and Resolve IPs (right-click in PEERS window on an active torrent).

That should eliminate UDP packets from uTorrent. You only need to port forward TCP this way. Some Belkin routers may not handle UDP and TCP forwarded to the same port reliably.

Keep Peer Exchange enabled...it should be encrypted due to above settings.

Choose FORCED encryption outgoing, and disable legacy (unencrypted) connections incoming.

You might want to experiment with allowing incoming legacy (unencrypted) connections to see if that's a little faster.

[orriblepox]

That does seem to have helped. I've got one user connected steadily now, though their speeds are pretty low-- 6-9 kBs at best. Not sure if that's on my end, though, because my other seeds today have hovered in the 30-40 range depending on the # of peers. I don't think that initial seeding is responsible either, but again, I don't know.

I'm going to assume the other two peers I can't connect to have closed their torrent software and the tracker is still reporting them because they'd attempted to download the torrent in the first place. I could be wrong, of course; this was my first experiment in uploading a torrent, so I've never had to think about this stuff before.

Thanks!

[Switeck]

Initial seeding doesn't seem to upload as fast as regular seeing when I've tested it.

I typically have to run at least 3 active torrents to sustain an upload speed above about 40 KB/sec.