Advice regarding Prefs > Bandwidth

Hi all

Can someone offer some advice please; I have a single torrent downloading (see screenshot) but although there are 32 seeders and 608 peers, I can only seem to connect to 5 seeders and 67 peers.

My thought were that I have my bandwidth connections set incorrectly but they appear to be OK.

Does anyone have any ideas why I can not connect to all 32 seeders and 608 peers? I may answer my own question here, but could it be that out of the 32 seeders, the upload slots of 27 of them are "full", thus only allowing me to connect to 5?

Does anyone have any ideas why I can not connect to all 32 seeders and 608 peers?

Because among other things, it's blatantly stupid to do so.

Connecting to everyone just kills your connection with protocol overhead.

Additionally, you get better speeds by connecting to other downloaders, since you're in a trade relationship with them and only a luck of the draw relationship with seeds.

Thanks for such a quick reply!

So would my explanation be why I can only connect to 67 out of the 608 peers?

Again, overhead concerns. There's no real need to connect to more than 60 peers unless you're on a genuine 100mbit+ connection.

hmm, i'm on 20mb but don't seem to be getting anything near what i would expect from the connection (i did a speed test at www.speedtest.net and got 15mb d/l and 600kb u/l).

could it be just slow seeders or something in my settings?

I tried to follow the guides but it kinda went a little deep and I think i lost my mind trying to understand it lol!

xx/512kbit

Start from there.

More peers/seeds doesn't guarantee you more speed.

Thanks again DWK; I was reading with interest the Wiki, in particular the "Bad ISP" section. I notice that my wonderfully bad ISP (Virgin Media - UK) is there and your team suggests I use Level 5 encryption to avoid traffic shaping. Below is a copy/paste of the Wiki:-

Level 5

Note: This is level is available from Azureus 3.0.2.3_B05 onwards.

Level 5 is only intended for people who have problems with a specific traffic shaping method employed by sandvine traffic shaping hardware, see Bad ISPs if this applies to you. The premise of this method is to minimize the amount of unencrypted information leaked. To enable it select following settings:

1. Tools -> Options -> Connection -> Transport Encryption

* Enable require encryption

* Select RC4

* Disable both fallback checkboxes

2. Tools -> Options -> Tracker -> Client

* Enable Do not announce the listening port to the tracker

* Set the peer limit to a low figure, start with 1 or 2

* set the Minimum time between tracker announces to 900 for example

3. Adjust DHT settings (2 mutually exclusive alternatives):

* Disable the DHT:

Go to Tools -> Options -> Plugins -> Distributed DB and uncheck Enable the distributed database

* Try to get more peers via DHT:

Go to Tools -> Options -> Plugins -> Distributed Tracker and uncheck Only track normal torrents[...]

4. Try to seed a torrent you haven't seeded within the last few hours or so before applying these settings

I notice these are instructions for Azureus 3.0.2.3_B05 onwards; as I use uTorrent 1.8, would these instructions be relevant or am I just being stupid (which is quite possible lol!)?

Thanks as always

Badger

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping

For these features in Azureus:

Enable require encryption

Select RC4

Disable both fallback checkboxes

Do this in uTorrent:

http://utorrent.com/faq/features#faq1

Force: Attempts to encrypt outgoing connections, and will NOT fall back to an unencrypted mode if the connection fails.

Disable incoming legacy (non-encrypted) connections.

These Azureus features don't have direct equivalents in uTorrent:

Enable Do not announce the listening port to the tracker

Set the Minimum time between tracker announces to 900 for example

A semi-close equivalent for "not announcing the listening port to the tracker" is to make sure uTorrent *IS* firewalled, preferably blocked by a router that isn't port forwarded rather than a software firewall on your computer. (Because the short reply packet, if any, will be different that way.)

About the only way to increase time between tracker announces in uTorrent is to remove trackers from the torrent (double-left click on torrent in top window and delete web address URLs).

"Set the peer limit to a low figure, start with 1 or 2"

Refers to per-torrent AND global connection max in uTorrent.

(Yes, 1 or 2 is insanely low! Hopefully, you can use at least 10.)

Disable the DHT...I hope needs no explanation, because DHT is in uTorrent. (Note: Azureus uses a different kind of DHT as well.) Also test WITH DHT enabled after disabling other things...

Disabling Resolve IPs probably won't hurt either...

Reducing net.max_halfopen (half open connection limit) to 1-4 (in uTorrent's Preferences, Advanced section) may also combat traffic shaping. Even using 0 is possible...silencing all of uTorrent's outgoing connection attempts until you increase it again.

Also reduce bt.connect_speed to 1-4 outgoing connection attempts PER SECOND. (It defaults to an insane 20 attempts per second! VERY obvious to the ISP if it's at the default value!)

If you're running uTorrent v1.8.2 or later, you might also want to disable uTP and Teredo/IPv6 connections. But test both WITH and WITHOUT uTP and/or Teredo/IPv6 connections -- some ISPs fail to throttle them at all!

Make sure it IS? firewalled? Isn't that worse for speeds?

Normally yes. Being firewalled is possibly even bad for many ComCast customers.

However it's something to try when nothing else works.

ISP's hardware has a far easier job identifying and blocking/disrupting BitTorrent traffic if the vast majority of it is incoming to a single port -- your listening port.

Constantly making LOTS of outgoing connections (high half open connection limit) is equally hard to hide.