Determining how many actual seeders

[VulcanTourist]

Is there any means to determine whether one is the sole seeder of a particular file? This might not matter to some, but it matters to me. If it is apparent to me that I am the sole source of a file, then I would feel obligated to keep seeding it until I see other sources appear. I need to know that I have successfully "paid it forward" before I can move on.

If the Seeds column shows 0 (1) - or would it be 0 (0)? - for a file, does that tell me with any certainty that I am actually the sole seeder? If not, is there another way I can tell?

[Sawyer22]

0(1) means you are the only seeder. But if the display is correct is a whole new question. I'm seeding 2 big torrent right now on global, just out of pure interest to see how this will turn out and I already see first hit n runners after 4 downloads. Well the files are both big, 32GB and 50GB.

Now, I would think, ever body would need to feel obligated to share at last 1.0 back. Then it would actually work, I guess. But as I found out that most people have there global uploads on public tracers set to 1KB/s. Its just a big waste. Even when they stay as seeders. They mostly don't share more then 1k and keep there full upload on private trackers. at last this are mine findings so far.

Now since I turned myself into a inital seeder. The performance has dropped for about a multiplier of almost 20 in average upload speed aspect for me.

I don't know how other people manage to seed on open trackers for them to work, but now I'm leaning into believing that they make the file available at last 1.0 time or maybe 2.0 and disconnect and let the peers sort out it later, with some babysitting later on.

[Ultima]

@VulcanTourist: Because of the way BitTorrent works, there is no definitive way to know whether you are the only seeder. Why? Because you don't necessarily know every peer in the swarm, and the tracker doesn't either. As well, the (1) or (0) are numbers reported by the tracker scrape, which can be stale data (and again, possibly inaccurate because the tracker doesn't necessarily know of all peers in the swarm).

[VulcanTourist]

What's the best advice, then, to avoid letting rare or unpopular files fall out of the torrent? There's a sort of tyranny-of-the-majority effect with BitTorrent that worries me; files in the minority just fade away, and sometimes much too soon! How do I combat that effect? My effort so far has been to set my seeding goal at 1000% (really hard with up- and downstream rates so different), since I figure there are probably ten leechers to every dedicated seeder. Is that the best I can do, short of re-seeding some things permanently, which I don't have the bandwidth to do?

[Switeck]

At some point with limited upload, you have to decide what lives and dies.

Maybe you can check back in a few days to see if a rare torrent still needs seeding?

Maybe you can get away with setting a bunch of rare torrents to initial seeding mode, low priority, and limit of 1 upload slot each?

Or settle for a lower ratio on over-seeded torrents to "spend" your limited upload on dying rare torrents?

[VulcanTourist]

Thanks, Switeck. I'll experiment with both your suggestions.