Hundreds of .torrent files in %appdata ?????

[kj2141]

I've been trying to troubleshoot download speed issues (mostly wildly erratic speed changes) and while considering using the example settings.dat file posted in "best practices" I see that i have about 600 .torrent files (some of them are "..somefilename.1.torrent", "..somefilename.2.torrent", etc). Seems to be no particularly notable pattern as to whether they were already downloaded or not - just lots of them, but not everything i downloaded. Question of course is: why, and mostly "what can i do with them???" (since there is no apparent or obvious mechanism by which they will clean themselves up??????

Thnx in advance, kj2141

[jbebad]

Lets assume that you have setup a directory where incomplete download torrent files are stored and another directory for the torrents that are completed.

1. You could just delete those torrents - they are probably from a time when you download a torrent prior to setting up your directorys.

2. Move the torrents to another directory to save for a while. You may get some errors of missing torrents and be forced to move some of the back or to another location.

3. Torrent files (and I mean different torrents) can have - from the trackers perspective - the same name. Some people just name their torrent Season 1, etc.. Windows will tag duplicates files being moved/stored in a folder with a numeric. So you can keep both files. Your job is to figure out which is which. You could also have download the same torrent more than one time - with the save option, rather than the open option.

Anyway I would move them to a separate directory and go through each one to determine if it is loaded into uTorrent and/or I wanted to still download it. Good luck. You have a lot of work ahead.

[kj2141]

Lets assume that you have setup a directory where incomplete download torrent files are stored and another directory for the torrents that are completed.

1. You could just delete those torrents - they are probably from a time when you download a torrent prior to setting up your directorys.

2. Move the torrents to another directory to save for a while. You may get some errors of missing torrents and be forced to move some of the back or to another location.

3. Torrent files (and I mean different torrents) can have - from the trackers perspective - the same name. Some people just name their torrent Season 1, etc.. Windows will tag duplicates files being moved/stored in a folder with a numeric. So you can keep both files. Your job is to figure out which is which. You could also have download the same torrent more than one time - with the save option, rather than the open option.

Anyway I would move them to a separate directory and go through each one to determine if it is loaded into uTorrent and/or I wanted to still download it. Good luck. You have a lot of work ahead.

SO... can i make the following assumptions ??

1. If i screw up and move a file that is or will become an "active" download, then the worst that happens is i get a "file error" of some kind and can just move the file back again (from the safekeep location i copied them all to) and then Force Re-check to resume?

2. Are files placed here on the first effort/attempt to download - that is, if i simply grabbed a torrent link but never actually started it, will it be in this directory or not?

3. From the Help file (UI/Preferences/Directories) if "seems" that .Torrents are treated differently than magnet downloads???? I generally exclusively select magnet downloads, so i am a bit confused about how to use the "Location of .Torrents" settings (which i have made no settings) versus the "Put new downloads..." and "Move completed downloads..." (which i have specified as an external USB drive for both) -- basically, "how did it know" to put stuff in the %appdata location?

And thanks for the initial answer - yeah, i guess it will take awhile to cull thru the 600 or so files there and figure out what i need and what i dont -- that is, once i have a strategy to do it!!

kj

[jbebad]

I am not a magnet expert and I do not use them if I can download the torrent.

If you move the torrents in appdata and uTorrent looks for them there you will get an error. It will tell you the name of the file and the path of where it should have been. Then you need to move that torrent back. I do not think uTorrent stores magnets once the torrent is downloaded. And the method for handling magnets has changed a lot in the beta(s). Once you move the file back - you may need to restart uTorrent or all you have to do is start the torrent - I do not know. Try and see what happens. If you stop uTorrent and move the files back then you are where you are now.

Note that you cannot change the name of the torrent file. Once it is loaded, that is the name uTorrent uses to locate the torrent file. If you change the name of the torrent file, you will be forced to delete the torrent entry in uTorrent and add it again.

I know of no way to move torrents within uTorrent.

Those torrents maybe the torrents downloaded from the magnets - since you did not specify where to store torrents, I think it will store them there. Remember uTorrent only uses magnets to get the torrent - so uTorrent will create the torrent once it gets the metadata using the magnet..

[kj2141]

Thanks - good insights! Must appreciated jbebad!! I will work on it this week and try and remember to post my discoveries back here.

[Registered]

I would back them up first !

[kj2141]

Thanks, i backed them up by moving the ones i chose to delete to a "safekeep" subdir under the uTorrent directory, and as i found the odd one or two i still needed i simply moved them back where they came from and all was fine.

Well, after a bit of checking, I have the following observation about the "left over" torrent files in %appdata ….. (note that this is not absolutely conclusive, but is based only on some simple observations). It seems that whenever uTorrent crashes (actually, simply hangs indefinitely and must be killed - which can be frequently) it creates a "new" file with a ".n" appended to the name (i.e. .1 or .2 or .3) for those torrents that were active at the time -- and when a file finally finishes downloading and is subsequently Removed (delete torrent and data) it may be only removing the "last" file and not going back and removing the "previous" incarnations of the same torrent file. Files not active at the time seem to be unaffected. I have not evaluated what happens when a download has been running before but is in the "stopped" state at the time of the crash.

BTW - with all respect to the developers of uTorrent (basically a great program and I realize it is free) it seems to be very unstable when it begins to get near the "limits" - I wonder if I am in the minority on this issue or if it is fairly widespread. I have, for example, my total download/upload set to 12 (max 6 down) and global connections set to 350 and max connected peers per torrent to 45. My Internet connection is DSL 2.0mbs/.5mbs (in practice I achieve about 80% of those numbers here in the jungle of Southern Leyte, Philippines). As long as I "don't touch anything" things run fine. But as soon as I manually start/stop torrents things come unraveled quickly for no apparent reason. For example, I might have only 9 downloads active and if I stop one and start another (with only about 250 - 270 connections in the status bar) it will hang more than 50% of the time. This of course forces a "kill" and restart (which then totally hoses the status of downloads (deciding to reload those that were "pending" and change some that were "checked" to "stopped", etc. so that you totally lose track of what files you were doing what with!!!! And it also seems nearly impossible to actually get files to "queue" for download - if I try and add a file to downloads when there are already a number running, then usually the new one forces one of the old ones to be queued and the new one downloads instead. And even when I get the newly added ones to be queued, then as soon as a crash occurs all the queued ones are removed from the queue and I have to start all over again. [i generally go on binges to find movies to download, so at any one time I might have 100 - 200 movies in my list and I sometimes like to "reorder" the sequence/priority in which they will be downloaded.]

I chose to set downloads higher than recommended because my achieved download speeds on any given file are so very erratic that if I do only 2 - 4 at a time I might spend a lot of time at very low bandwidth utilization. I often run with 2 - 4 "forced" downloads and 3 - 5 unforced downloads and this seems to give me a "mostly" high utilization of bandwidth. I tend to watch it during the day (or maybe I should be accused of "micro managing it"??) to try and keep a high utilization by stopping, pausing, and starting downloads. One question I have is: I am not an uploader, so are my seeds (uploads) while downloading counted as "active uploads" and therefore my "max active torrents" should be set higher so it includes that seeding as an active upload??? I know the help files say yes those seeds are counted, but I am particularly questioning the impact of queue.slow_dl_threshold and queue.slow_ul_speed since the variability of my individual file speeds sometimes varies from as high as 140kBps to as low as 0.1kBps on the same file. Should I be setting these two values to something ridiculously low like 100 instead of the default 1000???

Any thoughts, suggestions, ideas, etc. would be helpful. I am loving finally having access to decent quality movies (the pirated DVD's here really suck as to quality, and the choice is pretty limited too). Again, I chose not to follow the guidelines because with so few downloads and the often sporadic rate at which I am able to get files it means my bandwidth utilization is often not optimum (resulting in maybe only 2-4 downloads a day instead of perhaps 4 - 6 if I manage it myself). And my environment is Windows Vista, 2.1ghz dual core laptop (dedicated to this 75% of the time) with 6gb ram and 120gb SSD plus two large USB2 external drives (when fully utilized download bandwidth and anywhere from 4 - 8 downloads I run about 55% cpu utilization).

I know these last questions are outside the original one, but your answer was so helpful on the original one I thought I would come back to you for you insights again.

Thanks, kj

[kj2141]

Sorry - should have added: And when restarting uTorrent after it hangs and was killed, it seems to have a very serious problem getting restarted successfully without just hanging again within the first minute or so. Seems as if (just an observation) that it tries to "restart" downloads before it is ready, and as such it just "overruns" itself and hangs again (my only real observable point of this is to see that the "nodes" in the status bar seems to take up to a couple of minutes to get back up but in the meantime several downloads have attempted to already start). Because of this (and the way it seems to make its own decisions about "changing" state of various downloads (paused goes to download, checked goes to stopped, etc -- which hoses "my own view of what i thought the state of things was") it can actually take a couple of hours sometimes to "just get back to where i was"!!! At least it seems there should be some throttling mechanism to insure that it doesnt attempt to start download before it is "ready" to actually handle them!!!! Is this "restart delay" something i can control or at least influence to avoid the huge effort it can take to "get going again"??

kj