"Availability" needs work

[bitseeker]

These may have been discussed before - if so please excuse my ignorance of that.

1)

It seems to me that posting availability of 15.000 when only 2 or 3 peers are willing to "D" is a misleading statistic. The program should only add the figures for peers that are actually willing to download to you. This may be a reason we select a torrent for downloading because the #of seeders being high gives you a better chance of a timely download - but if when the program actually runs only a couple of the peers are willing to "D" then the stats are misleading and could even result in a lot of wated time on a torrent that never finishes.

2)

I once recieved a message from a ?tracker? that told me I cannot finish because I did not seed, but if no peers call for the data from my client then I cannot help it. I watch my own stats and if there are no upload stats on a seeding item for a week or 2 ( how long does the community expect me to wait for sharing requests ? maybe I will reconsider a longer time ) then I see no point in holding the seed out there and wasting space on my drive, usually it means that there is a better seed out there or the seed I have is uninteresting. That particular torrent was deleted and the source was noted so that I never call for material from them again.

3)

I found that the "seed while" limit in the preferences was easily misunderstood, if I wanted to limit the uploads to 5.0 ratio then state that as a decimal 5.0 rather than a percentage 500% - I confess I got confused for a while and had the limit set lower than I had intended. This has been changed, but was not the issue with the previous item - apparently my overall ratio was taken as an indicator of leeching - sorry, my stats should be improving as time goes by. Again, if there seems to be no demand then its still not practical to keep a seed forever.

4)

I also may be ignorant of the statistics I see - for now a lot of the information presented to me by the program is curious but not fully understood. One thing I would REALLY like to see is ( out of pure curiosity ) the RATIO of the peers that are displayed to me - it would certainly help I think to see others' ratios - maybe displaying those would help encourage others to increase their own ratios.

[Ultima]

1. Just because you're choked doesn't mean you'll always be choked forever. By your suggestion, if for whatever reason you were choked by every peer initially, even though the subset of the swarm you're connected to has 15.0 availability, µTorrent would report 0.0 availability, which is patently false and far more misleading.

2. Okay, and...?

4. Impossible without some extension to the protocol. And easily faked anyway, so it'd be a worthless statistic.

[bitseeker]

1 ) Thank you; it just seems that the closer one gets to 100 the less willing feeds you get.

2 ) Just putting forth an example; perhaps for a comment.

3 ) maybe its a suggestion for an improvement

4 ) If I knew it was so easy to fake a ratio I would have asked earlier why then there is so much emphasis on who seeds and who leeches, if you cannot rely on the report - - but then it makes no difference to me now, given this new info. - I would only have been interested in seeing the ratios of others to compare to mine )

Thanks for your time

[Ultima]

It's easy to fake any statistic you send. It's dumb to fake statistics sent to trackers though because trackers often check for obvious fakes like "look at me, I downloaded 0 KB and uploaded 20 TB."

Emphasis is placed on ratio not because it's important information to be shared between peers. It's important information for yourself to use as a meterstick to decide whether you've shared back as much as you can/should.

[bitseeker]

very true, it would be "dumb" to post an obvious bogus stat; but then those are the ones caught - - - it is a matter of trust and some are simply not trustworthy. I am a golfer, and for a game and philosophy of " honor " one can find numerous untrustworthy people ( at least at the amateur level for sure ). The cheating golfer injures the golf community reputation in a way similar to the leecher in this community. Neither character will change without peer pressure; and some will never change, if caught they are penalized, disqualified, barred or banned, and no one has pity. Given the ease which stats can be faked then it becomes harder to get solid evidence than for a golfer. So its a tough thing to do; the trackers of course do the best they can, but sometimes, as in the case I experienced, an innocent is branded a leecher - some good goes out with the bad on occasion.

Getting back to topic on stats,

So a measuring stick for one is a measuring stick for others too - its a common statement that " males gotta measure " and it is not always said in jest.

For me, I can tell myself I am sharing as much or more than I ought, but being my own best critic, I know that being able to compare to others ( even though they may be bogus ) is a good thing. I would not strive to match the best but hope to become at least average - that for me would eliminate the obvious fakers.

Really doesnt matter though, does it since the change to implement it is too much work, no offense intended... I leave it to the developers, who have done such a good job so far, to make uTorrent the best it can be. Many thanks for a great utility - and making it free shows your heart as well. Bravo.

[Lord Alderaan]

4:

The BitTorrent Protocol doesn't need the ratio of peers to work optimally. Basing any protocol principle on the ratio makes no sense and would make the protocol more susceptible to cheaters^*. Peers pretty much only exchange info that is necessary for the protocol to work optimally under varying circumstances.

The display of this info in the various screens of µTorrent is an added bonus (it's simply there for those interested) and by itself not a good reason to extend the protocol.

^*Peers who try to persuade other peers to give them more speed while it isn't in the best interest of the whole swarm to do so. Tracker cheating is a whole other issue and unrelated to this request because information peers exchange doesn't affect information send to the tracker.

[bitseeker]

I simply thought for my own interest that I would like to see the ratio of another peer or seed. My post was not intended as a push for speed or optimization, only interest in my peers' ratios. The rest of my dialogue was philosophy and rhetorical question. Thanks for the discussion

[Lord Alderaan]

Yes I get that. In short my post was: "The BitTorrent protocol doesn't care about your interests, only in its own efficiency."