What if you aren't worried about leechers (sorry if wrong section)

[GabrielSylar]

Suppose you are using utorrent to distribute personal content, and you want to get your book, or music, or whatever, to as many people as possible.

Should you still keep anti leech protection in place ? Or since you don't care if people take your content without giving anything back to you, Do settings like Ban Ratio, and Allow Same IP matter at all in this situation ? If they don't, what setting adjustments would ensure the fastest one way distribution of independent content?

[Switeck]

There are clients that claim to be running BitTorrent (XunLei and BitComet in particular) that if you have a mixed group of peers to choose from...ban them if you want to get your content to the most people at the fastest speeds possible.

Connecting to too many peers at once will actually reduce your total upload speed.

Many upload slots at once will reduce average upload speed to each upload slot to dismal dial-up like speeds. This is especially bad for giant torrents using 2 or 4 MB piece size -- because if your average upload speed per upload slot is only 0.5 KB/sec then the delay before anyone has a complete piece to share to someone else is over an hour.

[GabrielSylar]

Do you have to search and manually ban them as they come up, or is there a way to do it all at once. XunLei and BitComet ban huh ? Any others to kick ? Thanks man!

[Switeck]

You have to manually ban them by ip. XunLei is MUCH worse than BitComet.

Probably should nail the "downloader" clients -- Opera and file-resumers that run BitTorrent but only "sometimes", because many of them aren't set up to re-seed torrents once they're stopped. In short, they're hit-and-runners by design.

[GabrielSylar]

I just had an epiphany man, lol. I think I am finally understanding this.

I had never really looked that closely at individual peers. But if I have a line that averages 900k up, that 900 is divided among all of them. So by limiting my active torrents, and peers, and upload slots, I am in effect controlling how big the slices of pie are.

That said, here's the question. Most of the files I seed are between 300 and 800 megs. What's a reasonable upload rate to try to maintain to users downloading files of that size, and how would you recommend setting things in order to maintain that quality speed overall to peers connected?

Finally, is there anything in the advanced settings, that can help me keep a good quality speed per peer connected ratio ?

Thanks for all the help

[Switeck]

A really nasty kicker about BitTorrent speeds and UL-vs-DL ratios...almost none of that matters if your current upload speed is spread too thin.

Uploading at 1000 KB/sec split evenly between 10000 peers at the same time is nearly worthless.

The reason: piece size!

Assume piece size is 4 MB for this example.

1000 KB/sec divided by 10000 peers = 0.1 KB/sec each.

It will take 4096 (KB per 4 MB) times 10 seconds per KB = 40,960 seconds before any of these hypothetical peers complete their first piece. Over 11 hours!

Admittedly, with 10000 peers completing at once, the problem seems self-correcting after that...except many of the pieces are likely duplicated because of lack of coordination between the peers on what they're downloading.

[GabrielSylar]

Is there a way to check piece size ? Is it better to set the size manually ?

Given the info you just gave me, if you were in my place, how passive would you have your settings, in order to make things the most efficient ?

I can give you any info you need, but as I said my connect is a stable 800-900k up. Right now I have it at 10 active, 500 total connections, 10 connected peers, and 10 upload slots. I really don't want my peers waiting 11 hours for one piece LOL. Any adjustments to make ? Anything in advanced ?

Thanks very much man I appreciate it!

[GabrielSylar]

If you set your maximum number of connected peers, and maximum upload slots per torrent to one each, would that be good since you're giving maximum upload priority to each peer ? This way it seems if I upload 10 torrents at a time, they each get 20-30 k up a second, and thus get their file faster. Is there a downside to this ?

[Switeck]

Torrent piece size is shown on the General window/tab at bottom of uTorrent.

1 upload slot per torrent creates only optimistic unchoke upload slots on each torrent...those do not perform full tit-for-tat behavior and thus will not work well while downloading. It can also create this condition:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=56897

While only seeding/uploading, I'd suggest using only 2-4 upload slots per torrent and only 10 max connections per torrent.

While downloading, you may want to increase max connections per torrent to 30-50.

[GabrielSylar]

My piece size is 1mb, each file having between 400 and 800 pieces.

I have 20 torrents seeding, and my max torrents active is set to 10.

Is that too low or high in your opinion ?

My max upload speed is set to 1200 kB/s

global max number of connections is set to 500. Again is that too high ?

Per your suggestion, max connected peers per torrent is set to 10

and max upload slots per torrent is 2. When I look at my peers, the torrents that have more than 1 or 2 connected, (say for instance, 10) most all peers are inactive, with periods of inactivity reaching from 1 to more than 5 minutes.

Generally 2 out of 10 peers will remain active. That's why I was setting connected peers to 1, so a peer can connect, quickly get an entire file from me, then join the swarm, and let the next peer in line begin.

I just want to more so understand why it is better to set things the way you suggested, and if I am indeed understanding you properly. I will, of course assume your direction to be the best route to follow, even if after this I still don't understand, and will set things accordingly. I just want to be the most efficient I can possibly be.

Thanks for all the help. I appreciate your efforts to help me better comprehend how the system works

[Switeck]

How many torrents your line can easily manage depends almost entirely on how fast your sustained upload speed max is and how stable your networking is.

With 1200 KiloBYTES/second upload speed, 20 torrents with 2-4 upload slots each is no big deal.

A problem is occurring if you're seeing 5-8 out of 10 peers on each busy torrent stay inactive while connected to you. Raising upload slots from your current value of 2 to 4 should "fix" that almost by itself. Even raising upload slots to 9 isn't totally out of the question, since you'd still be sending each 1 MB in less than 5 minutes.

uTorrent won't run very well with max connections per torrent set much lower than 10, especially with high connection-attempt rates -- which can tie up most/all of those connection slots.

[GabrielSylar]

Thanks so much. Looks like my settings will stay the way they are, with 500 500 global max connections, and 10 connected peers and 4 upload slots. You said it looks like I should be able to raise that 4 to even 9 since I'm going to be sending a meg in less than 5 minutes. Why an odd number there ? Just curious, 9 instead of 10 ? Would the higher number be more efficient per torrent ? I'm seeing that higher isn't always better. Which from looking at a lot of posts on here, is a concept a lot of people don't grasp lol.

Any advanced settings I could adjust that would help keep my per peer average higher ? (as of now the only settings I have tweaked are max half open, at 200, with tcp.ip patched to 250, and bt.connect_speed at 10)

Last, I hate to keep adding to this thread, and will make a new one if you think I should, but I am running utorrent on 2 computers here locally, with identical setups (one runs constantly, one gets shut off at night). Anything I should adjust due to that ?

You should put a paypal donation button on here. Those of us grateful for the help you constantly put out with no obligation to do so, would gladly contribute here and there. Thanks again man

[Switeck]

"Any advanced settings I could adjust that would help keep my per peer average higher ? (as of now the only settings I have tweaked are max half open, at 200, with tcp.ip patched to 250, and bt.connect_speed at 10)"

With only 20 torrents started, that is probably both unnecessary and even bandwidth-wasteful.

Reduce bt.connect_speed to default (7) or slightly lower, as that corresponds to how many outgoing connection attempts to make per second. It doesn't count existing connections or how fast you're getting incoming connections.

net.max_halfopen is how many TCP outgoing half-open connection attempts (most likely to peers/seeds) to have at once. It doesn't count outgoing uTP connection attempts. Like bt.connect_speed, there's little value with having a high number here. The old default of 8 should be sufficient if you're not firewalled in uTorrent. 20 would be sufficient overkill to handle everything. Any higher and you're probably just increasing how fast uTorrent retries dead peer/seed ip addresses.

Running 2 uTorrent clients at once can thoroughly complicate how to set uTorrent so it doesn't overload the line.

[GabrielSylar]

Adjustments duly noted and made. Thank you. 500 max connections, 10 max peers and 9 up slots per look good to you then ? Or less than 500 max and would 4 up slots be advantageous opposed to 9 ?

Again greatly appreciate it

[GabrielSylar]

Sorry to be asking so many questions, man. I know you're busy. Just checking to see if you noticed my last question. That's the last one man, pinky swear LOL. Thanks

[Switeck]

9 upload slots should be ok if only a small number of torrents are "fully" active and need all 9.

If you almost always have 20 active torrents, each with 9 upload slots...even your upload speed would get split kinda thin.

I missed your post because I'm getting inundated by all the OTHER posts here to read. Moderating to delete spam is a busy job even if I don't answer ANY post.

Your questions are not a problem per se, some of them I do have to think about for a few days before I can come up with a simple answer. I wish I could say I had simple, good answers for all the posters here...but some of them have hopeless conditions and/or give too-limited information for me to even understand their problems.