could someone clear up a couple of things for me?

[bluejeans]

I've "learned" off of others two things about torrents:

1) It's better to download from a torrent that has, for example, 15 seeds and 500 leechers, than a torrent of the same file that has more seeds (say 50) but also way, way more leechers (e.g 1500) - is this true, that a torrent with more seeders isn't of much benefit if there are also way, way more leechers than the less-seeded one?

And also, with ADSL, I have about 15mbit dl/700kbit up bandwidth. I'm told that it's not a good idea to use up most or all your upload bandwitdh when it's that low, is this true? I've also been told that throttling it about 30% of your total upload speed will result in faster downloads, is this the case?

[foomonger]

The bigger the swarm, the faster your download, usually, regardless of the number of seeds and leechers, so long as there are at least a few seeders.

And yes, if you use ALL your upload bandwidth, there will be no upload capacity left for ACK (acknowledgment) packets to be sent back, and download speeds will slow, sometimes to a crawl. Simply cap your upload speed to no more than 90% of your total capacity. Keep in mind that anyone else on your local network using upload bandwidth could tip you over the limit.

The best method of controlling all this is to run some kind of traffic shaping on your router (OpenWRT + wondershaper, for example, or any Linux system with tc installed), this will keep your browsing snappy and downloads fast during even the heaviest torrent sessions.

-fm

[ciaobaby]

The bigger the swarm, the faster your download,

Not necessarily, the speed depends on the connected peers NOT the swarm count.