Maximum amount of open torrents

[tential]

I'm trying to configure my utorrent and this setting is hard to configure for me.  It seems most guides assume that the torrents you're picking will have lots of seeds/peers and end up with a number between 3-5.  But almost all of my torrents have maybe 1-2 seeds/peers at most, many have none for long periods of time.  Is there a max number of connected peers number I should be trying to hit in order to cap out my download speeds?  

 

I feel like having only 3-6 open torrents is a waste with how few peers/seeds I'm connected too.  Shouldn't I in theory be perfectly fine with being able to connect to 50-100 torrents if they all have this few seeds/peers?

Is there anything wrong with that?

[DreadWingKnight]

Just leave them low and let uTorrent manage things automatically. It will, for purposes of queueing, ignore torrents that aren't moving.

And trying to connect to hundreds of torrents at once will make you use more on protocol overhead than you get of actual pieces.

[tential]

So you're suggesting I leave it at 4 torrents, each downloading from only 1 seed, going at a max of 15 kb usually, when my bandwidth is 100 Mbs?  That really doesn't make sense.

 

There has to be a far larger number I can start at a time.  I mean only ever being connected to a maximum of 8 peers when other users connect to hundreds?  I'm sure there is a number between a "couple hundred" and 4, given the situation that works optimally for me.  I'm never above even 250 kbps with 4 torrents open.  I'd like to be getting close to my bandwidth cap.

 

Edit:

So I tried to do some quick reading on protocol overhead and it has to do with maximum global connections if I'm not mistaken?  From some posts I saw you make with another advanced user advising someone else from my understanding the reason you wouldn't set this number at something like 1000 is that utorrent would be losing so many peers and trying to gain them back that protocol overhead would be terrible.  And that it's based on your upload speed as well.  Well my upload speed is also very very high.  I think it's 50 mbs but it may be higher.  And I'm not trying to change the maximum amount of global connections at all.  I'm just trying to actually get close to that "200" value.  Normally people use well seeded torrents but I never do so the max global peers I'm connected to has never been over 100 or rarely over 50.  

 

Wouldn't getting my global connections at least over 100 help me get closer to capping out my bandwidth in torrents that don't have many peers or high bandwidth seeders?

[DreadWingKnight]

Let's see a speedtest.net results image please.

[tential]

http://www.speedtest.net/result/3788876771.png

 

That's a speedtest result but I never turned off my torrents, and did it over wireless on an old laptop that doesn't support wireless AC so I know I have more there.  I've seen higher speeds on my dad's phone which has wireless AC and we tested it without me torrenting.  I barely am ever using my bandwidth so I'd like to actually get closer to the full use of my bandwidth.

[DreadWingKnight]

You're going to run into other problems hitting the limit of the connection before anything that you do to your torrent client settings can actually max you out.

Random read and random write speeds are going to kill your ability to max your connection out, regardless of the number of torrents you try to run.

[tential]

You're going to run into other problems hitting the limit of the connection before anything that you do to your torrent client settings can actually max you out.

Random read and random write speeds are going to kill your ability to max your connection out, regardless of the number of torrents you try to run.

 

This is why I came here because I can't seem to figure out what that "sweet" spot is and I don't really understand how utorrent works in conjunction with hard drives.  I haven't seen any tests  of it unlike CPU/GPU testing which I'm more familiarwith.  I thought perhaps if I run SSDs (knowing it would die) or if I ran a RAID hard drive setup it would improve but I haven't hit that cap where random reads/writes neuter my speed yet.  Currently I do like 10 downloads in which I have 1-2 peers max, then 3 or so that actually have seeds/peers.

[DreadWingKnight]

RAID 0 stripes would get you a lot closer to the performance required, but if you're dealing with low activity torrents, basically nothing will help you.

[tential]

RAID 0 stripes would get you a lot closer to the performance required, but if you're dealing with low activity torrents, basically nothing will help you.

 

I was hoping for a more "technical" explanation perhaps as to a way to figure out your max amount of open torrents, maximum open amount of connections, etc. but doesn't seem like there is a way to find out from looking around and from asking you.  

Guess I'll just use the information I learned though to make my guess work I've been doing now a bit better.  Hopefully HDD space becomes a bottleneck before this becomes too much of an issue.  Not sure it will be though I've already gotten 24TB of HDDs and with HDD sizes increasing the way they are and prices dropping I'll easily have over 40TB by the end o next year as long as my DL speeds keep up =D