Not connecting to as many peers & seeds as uTorrent v2.0.4

[Simon100]

µTorrent 2.2 build 23235 stable does not connect to as many peers or seeds as 2.0.4. I"ve tried increasing # of connections under bandwidth, but it has not helped. Speed is inferior to previous stable release v2.0.4.

Is preventing uTorrent 2.2 from connecting to too many peers & seeds a "feature" to prevent routers from locking up/crashing due to NAT table overload??

How do I prevent uTorrent from limiting the # of peers & seeds I can connect to & abide by the limits I set instead.? I can understand the need to limit # of connections for low speed/memory NAS devices running bittorrent but for a multi-gigabyte & multi-core PC & business grade router, I would think it is unnecessary.

[Switeck]

Is v2.2 failing to connect to the same seeds/peers?

Or (quickly?) disconnecting once connected?

Is v2.2 banning the seeds/peers for some reason?

NAS simply does *NOT* hold up well if uTorrent is running torrents on it. It may not "die", but we've read horror stories of corrupted data and disk overloads at consumer broadband speeds (<10 mbit/sec).

(Not that seems to be what you're doing, but just worthy of note...any indirect connection to the hard drive/s such as NAS or USB tends to go badly with uTorrent.)

[Simon100]

I just want it to connect to many peers & seeds if I set Global Max # of connections to something like 5000, Max # of connected peers per torrent to 500, and # Upload slots per torrent to 50.

I started transfer first on v2.0.4 & let it run for awhile. It was able to connect to many more peers. v2.2 connected to fewer than half the # of peers. I disabled uTP on both and speed increased quite a bit but v2.2 was still slower & exchanging much less with peers. It's all on a Win7 x64 PC, NOT connected to any NAS. I'm just trying to make it saturate my WAN at night.

[Switeck]

How fast is this WAN?

[Simon100]

WAN speed will be about 6Mbps / 768Kbps. Router is pfsense (default can handle 100,000 NAT connections), ports properly forwarded, no traffic shaping used on router. Upload rate set about 70% of upload to make room for ack. uTP is disabled. Also tested on Tomato Router & a Netgear WNDR3700 Gigabit router. DSL modem in bridge mode. HTTP transfers from download manager from Microsoft.com of their free Express Home development packages can saturate d/l bandwidth.

[Switeck]

You can download at 6 MegaBYTES/second?!

Still, I wouldn't recommend over 1000 global connections OR over 200 connections per torrent for a 100 megabit/second symmetric dedicated fiber optic line.

[Simon100]

No, it's AT&T 6 megabits per second ADSL (small "b"). They have also have 24 megabits per second VDSL, which is no a good deal for the price.

What # should upload slots be?

I'm wondering why uTorrent 2.2 will not connect to more peers compared to v2.0.4? Is it to prevent router from being overloaded? I'm only connecting to a dozen or so peers when there are hundreds available, sometimes almost a thousand.

[Switeck]

The number of upload slots per torrent should be low enough that EACH active upload slot gets at least 3 KiloBYTES/second upload speed on average...but definitely not more than 10 KiloBYTES/second upload speed (unless you're on a stupidly fast line.)

So if your total upload speed limit/max is 60 KiloYBTES/second, then there should never be more than 20 upload slots in use at once spread between *ALL* your active torrents. Taking this further means there should not be greater than 20 active torrents, since each has to have at least 1 upload slot. But to be efficient, the most active torrents shouldn't be above about 5.

At 5 active torrents, that would mean at most 4 upload slots each...but probably better at 3 upload slots each.

How do you know for certain that 100's of peers are available?

I've seen tracker+PEX report 600+ peers, yet can't reach 100 connected no matter if I use v2.0.4 or v2.2.

Are you seeing any banned for PEX flood error messages? (It's very buggy in both v2.0.4 and v2.2!)

[Simon100]

I didn't realize that # of peers may be exaggerated. I'm also finding that some clients such as Xunlei discriminates against uTorrent and some of them just refuse to connect unless there is no choice.

Thanks for the help. After alot of trial and errors, I find that having 2000 global, 500 per torrent and 6 upload slots per torrent & uTP disabled, Encryption Forced & allow incoming Legacy enabled gives the best results.

[Switeck]

It's still ridiculous.

You're wanting to connect to potentially 500 peers+seeds at a time per torrent but will only upload to 6 at a time. On very large+slow downloads, you're going to end up with a *LOT* of mad peers that won't give anything to you because your end never gave them anything over many hours/days being connected to them.

[Simon100]

It was nothing scientific of course I just used 6 upload slots as the default of 4 was slower than 6 and 50 was causing speed to decrease. So, I started from 200 per torrent and slowly increased by 50 every 10 minute or so. Increasing past 500 had no effect, I figure the particular torrent can actually really see at most 200 clients or less. But I see your point, if it was say a busier torrent that "really" had a few thousand seeds/peers, I could be dropped to the bottom of the waiting list for pieces....

[Switeck]

Your overheads from connecting to >200 peers/seeds at once adds up -- even if it's only 0.01 KB/sec EACH by 500 total you're using ~5 KB/sec down and up just to stay connected to them. That doesn't count if they disconnect and you (or they) try to reconnect. Each reconnect handshake might be ~0.5 KB if using encryption. Doing that over and over again is called "churn" -- you can see its effects in the logger window, text just zips by from all the connects/disconnects.

You're only uploading to 6 peers at a time per torrent. Even over a couple hour's time, you may upload to fewer than 50 peers. The rest get nothing, so obviously it doesn't scale for more than a handful use similar settings.

Try going the other way for a test...even all the way down to 10 connections per torrent. (Though I suggest using more like 30-50 while downloading, only 10 if only seeding.) My guess is if you already have >100 connections that the best 5-10 for each torrent will be kept and speeds may not drop much at all.