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Question about peers/seeds number in the brackets


Ash123

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In the peers column you have two numbers, the first number is the number of peers currently connected to you, is the other number in the bracket the total (historic) number of peers that have connected to you for that particular torrent?

The same question for the seeds column, whilst you are below 100% you can see the number of seeds but when you hit 100% that number disappears, so how can you tell how many are still seeding with you? Is that the number in the bracket? If not waht does that number indicate?

The reason I ask is I watched a peer hit 100% yet the two numbers in the seeds column were both zero. ie 0(0).

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Answered many times and covered in Help file (press F1):

Seeds displays the number of seeds you are connected to, and the number of seeds in the swarm within the parentheses. The number of seeds in the swarm is an estimate based on the maximum number of seeds found either between the amounts reported by any tracker, or the number of seeds µTorrent has encountered within its peer cache. If the torrent job is stopped, and bt.scrape_stopped is enabled, µTorrent will show the maximum number of seeds in the swarm as reported by the tracker scrapes.

Same for Peers column.

Refreshing peer/seed number in swarm is not instantaneous when a peer becomes a seed.

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The same question for the seeds column, whilst you are below 100% you can see the number of seeds but when you hit 100% that number disappears, so how can you tell how many are still seeding with you?

1) As soon as you have completed your download (without any partial file selection) you change your client status from peer (leech) to seed. Hence automatically your client will start to reject any other seeding peer which is the reason why you will always see 0 in the seed columns outside of the brackets. Remember that this column shows only the connected peers with your client, nothing else.

2) The seed or peer # in brackets is simply tacken from tracker scrapes (http requests for status information) and uT has a strange kind of summing this information. It can be very missleading so to get a better picture (but nevertheless it will never be accurate) always go to the trackers tab to have the overview and judge by yourself. Be aware that due to various technical limitations of the system (bittorrent implementing) the information shown in brackets can be totally false e.g. not reflecting the actual present state. Use observation and experience to get a better feeling... :D

3) There is a very simple way which apparently too many people are not really aware of. It's a magic word called availibility. [Actually I don't remember if the column is enabled by default when you start uT for the first time else just right click on the column header bar and select it.] Use this to see as a seeding client how many seeders are (potentially) in the swarm. If the # left from the point is >2 >1 then there must be another [potential] seeder in addition to you seeding [nested in] to the swarm [which at that moment is connected with your client.] But also here the very interesting (awesome) thing to note is that the # on the right will tell you much about the quality of the pieces available in the swarm however not about the quantity !! In other words there may be many potential seeders in the swarm but you cannot see it soley based on the availibility. To be able to understand and see it you will have to check also the peers tab and pay attention to the % of completion for the connected peers. So for instance if you see 5 peers out of 7 which have a completion level >98% and you are the only seeder than chances are high that in the following min there will be 5 seeds more. Immediately you will see them disappear from your peers tab list and by this time the availibility # left from the point should increase by 5. (Then follow how it may quickly go down again probably due the leeches who might disconnect soon to get some new bandwith for downloading (or seeding) other torrents.) [As soon as the last missing piece will have been uploaded within a matter of seconds (or more if the pieces are 4MB) the availibility (left from the point) will peak up to 5. Then follow how it will quickly fall down again due to the completed peers (leech) which will be disconnected and appear as seeds in the tracker figures inside the brackets.] If there would have been only 2 peers close to 100% in this example the avilibility # right from the point would be exactly the same but the increase after completion [of the potential seeds] of the # left from the point would be only +2 max. I hope I could explain this point clearly enough. I have never seen it well explained and clearly documented, only my experience and own "brainware" led me to this insight... [And some good advises from people knowing more than me led me to edit what I did above. :) ]

4) Keep in mind that finally the only way to see if a swarm really needs you again as seeder, at a certain point of time you will have to shortly restart the torrent because only like this will you see if many peers need you and how much they really need you. In fact there is IMO an important information which is purely missing for good seeding in uT: You cannot (clearly) see what pieces you are uploading nor their single availibility within the swarm so you have to figure it out based on other information sources. Here again the most important information is the overall availibility in the swarm [NB: Actually it's a sub part of the swarm because the availibilty you see is only based on the directly connected peers with your client!] AND the % completion for every connected peer (peers tab). Use this to get a good picture if and how much you should support the swarm again by seeding more. Of course if the tracker(s) reports (with at best bt.scrape_stopped set on true which by the way is totally illogical to me because actually you want the scrape stop to be false but anyway...) 20 seeds it might not be necessary but also here it depends of the potential of real peers (leeches) too. (I say potential because at a certain point of time you might only have a little part of the potentially interested peers able to connect you.) So absolute AND relative # have to be used to take a proper decision!

Ok I stop here because otherwise I'm going to write a tutorial... :o

I hope it this will help better understand what's all really about... :D

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