Possible to set "I'll upload to you as fast as you'll download to me?"

Is it possible to set something like "I'll upload to you as fast as you'll download to me?"

I get the whole equal distribution / shared burden / don't ignore the others ideas. And that max. upload limit comes into play here.

I see on a number of torrents where a peer will be sucking from me at, say, 6.5, but only giving me at, say 1.1.

Is there a way to say I'll upload to you at the rate you'll download to me? Or something. The swarm will converge faster on that torrent (or so it seems to me). In some senses, if I have a choice of getting the incoming piece from another peer I'm not talking to yet, but will respond in kind more, I'd prefer to talk to them. If you know what I mean.

[The math / observation / reality of all these algorithms boggles my mind!]

Thanks kindly.

I agree,

It is rather frustrating at times that people set the download limit so low.

I for one would rather have the person in and gone as quick as possible that way it eases the burdon on the rest of us.

> I for one would rather have the person in and gone as quick as possible that way it eases the burdon on the rest of us.

I agree, but, as is said so often elsewhere in these messages, people are afraid of increased costs due to bandwidth consumption, particularly when new to utorrent.

It did take me some time to come to understand that utorrent has mechanisms to limit total consumption - once I came to fully grok that rate doesn't matter, total (monthly) consumption does.

Using up bandwidth in 10 days instead of 20 is the same consumption, but everyone all around is happier.

2nd link in my signature...the more people follow it, the faster almost everyone's download speeds would be.

You can make a monthly bandwidth quota go a little farther by disabling DHT (both kinds) and Resolve IPs.

There's no little point trying to upload faster than your line can sustain, your ISP throws away the excess packets (if those packets even manage to clear your modem)...and those same packets may still get counted against your monthly quota limit!

If you get the green light in uTorrent (meaning not firewalled), then you don't need to set net.max_halfopen very high -- because what's the point of quickly retrying the same ips over and over again?

If all you're doing is seeding, there's almost NO reason to connect to more than 5-10 more peers than you have upload slots per torrent...so typically only about 6-10 TOTAL connections per torrent.

It bugs me a little to be seeding and trying to upload to a peer...and they just won't download from me faster than 10 KiloBYTES/second even though I still have 50+ KiloBYTES/second spare upload speed. It's usually because they've overloaded their connection (often due to BAD settings in their BitTorrent client!) or they're on yet another hostile ISP.

> here's no little point trying to upload faster than your line can sustain

If I was hitting my upload speed limit, I wouldn't have posed the question.

>It bugs me a little to be seeding and trying to upload to a peer...and they just won't

> download from me faster than 10 KiloBYTES/second even though I still have 50+

> KiloBYTES/second spare upload speed.

Which was the point of my question. Except, seeding or not, if you have a peer with less % than you have, you're still uploading to them.

> If all you're doing is seeding

I'm not (that far in the torrent), if I were I wouldn't be trying to have them download / upload at mutually faster speeds than they are. The point of my post was, people, drink faster, and open the spigot a little, if we're mutually sharing pieces. (And both of us have capacity left in that direction.)

> 2nd link in my signature...the more people follow it, the faster almost everyone's

> download speeds would be.

> It's usually because they've overloaded their connection (often due to BAD settings

> in their BitTorrent client!) or they're on yet another hostile ISP.

Pity a 'magic button' (part of setup) can't be created to automate this. Then the bad settings would go away and you could stop repeating yourself in every post. ('cause all the settings would be correct and the bad settings wouldn't be present in the first place.)

Automate what?

Settings are generally "bad" only for their connection, for a much faster connection they may be fine.

Even if the settings are correct based on speed tests, ISP throttling can make that moot. Case in point, Rogers Cable ISP in Canada...many people can't effectively seed/upload faster than 5 KiloBYTES/second. But if they run their uTorrent at 50+ KiloBYTES/second upload settings (based on speed tests)...things won't work good especially from other people's viewpoints.

Or peak hours things really are bad for cable and ADSL lines in high density areas. No good settings at all for then...often it's best to just stop uTorrent entirely.

> Automate what?

Everything.

Part of my point here is, until settings are automated you're going to have to continue repeating yourself.

Your continued 'read the 2nd link in my signature' is obviously a reaction to that and a rather efficient

mechanism to do so. I am somewhat astonished that you still have the patience to keep doing so - you must

feel like you're constantly swimming upstream! (Mind you, I suspect the reference to the 2nd link has also

become a knee jerk reaction to all messages.)

Moreover, 'everything' must be dynamic - settings must change depending upon the network conditions being experienced at the time. They must be able to roll with, as you mention, both bad times of the day and bad ISPs.

Until that level of automatic settings changes occurs there will be perpetual complaints of speed problems. Ce la vie.

But, to my point in the original post, it would be nice if sharing peers could ramp up their feeding / drinking of each other while their respective up/down bandwidth permits. I do get that there are lots of other elements in play. And that the math of 'optimal' is just mind boggling.

My recent experience seems to suggest that my speed problems have more to do with social issues than technical ones - e.g. a couple of hundred peers out there with no seeds all sitting at the same download %, peers not sharing at the same rate (triggering the original post), and, in general, the community not transmitting fast enough for me to really have to worry about settings / bandwidth rates / bandwidth caps.

> Or peak hours things really are bad for cable and ADSL lines in high density areas. No good settings at all for

> then...often it's best to just stop uTorrent entirely.

Or just ignore it and live with it. Better, perhaps, that, than constantly sucking up eye time minding things. Getting on with other things in your day instead. I can see where the scheduling can help here, but that means peering into your crystal ball to determine what those poor periods are, and that they will happen consistently. In one sense, better to just ignore that and take whatever the network gives, whenever the network gives it. On the other hand, doing so contributes to the general congestion, making this attitude in some senses self-defeating.

I have looked over your links, thank you, and tweaked accordingly. However, I went back to setting speeds to 0 (unlimited) / automated - the speed graph goes goofy otherwise. I particularly noticed the upload slots bits. I can't say I've noticed much differences. Like I said, I suspect my problems are more social than technical.

I wish the speed graph axis legends included more labels than just '0' and '100%'. Having labelled the top of the graph 57, it would be nice to see the middle line labelled 25. And the vertical lines labelled with times.

My ISP is Rogers. Rogers not only limits torrents, it limits encryption as well. (Degrading ssh and https traffic in the process. <sigh>). Whether degradation due to torrent, or encryption, it is what it is, not much I can do about it. I will not (can not) go back to Bell wholesaler (too far from 'C.O.' I found out, many years later!), and would not pay dry loop fees even if I could. Bell lines and their shaping vs. Rogers lines and their shaping (yet cheaper due to no dry loop fees) means I'm stuck where I am.

Is there a link to what one can do when one is on Rogers? Will it really make any significant difference?

Rogers ISP is the textbook BitTorrent throttling case where almost nothing works very well BECAUSE they severely throttle unknown traffic. This is why it's important to allow both encrypted and unencrypted peers/seeds...and determine your effective upload speed max (outside of peak hours of course.)

Peak hours generally are from 6 PM to about 10 PM especially on weekdays but even to a lesser degree on Sat. and Sun. on many ISPs.

You need to be testing uTorrent v1.9 alpha if you want to see big automated improvements.

You cannot "solve" an equation with too many unknown variables. Each variable that's made a constant makes automation simpler, and that's much of the importance of my speed chart.

uTorrent can be set up to try to maximize its download OR upload speed at the expense of EVERYTHING else using the connection...but even then, many things about the connection must be known in advanced to give uTorrent decent settings.

uTorrent already does Tit-For-Tat if given fast enough peers to share with. But it's not obvious which ones are fast, certainly not in advance!

Even peers/seeds on "fast" ISPs may either intentionally or on accident have their BitTorrent client thoroughly crippled due to bad settings and other networking activities. So uTorrent cannot even make educated guesses about how fast a peer/seed will be based on ip/ISP.

There's no helping "dead"/stuck-on-xx% completed torrents. You can either wait indefinitely till someone returns to seed it to completion -- or ask at the website where you got it for someone to seed it -- or stop the torrent. I've had numerous torrents like that in the past and I usually put them to 1 KB/sec upload speed, 1 upload slot and forgotten about them. I've already done my sharing part on those torrents, having achieved ratios typically over 4:1. If I complete the torrent, I might change my settings and seed it for awhile, but not UNTIL then!

If you want more ideas, try reading posts in the Protocol Design Discussion...this one in particular should impress the very real difficulty of finding "fast" peers/seeds:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=31519

And this one that I posted is an attempt to make seeds a little faster for no net loss:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=47523

> You cannot "solve" an equation with too many unknown variables. Each variable that's made a constant makes automation simpler, and that's much of the importance of my speed chart.

Granted, however you can automate at least the determination (of at least some) of the variables. Particularly as, as you note, different conditions exist at different times of the day.

pings, tracerts, latencies, current ISP, and so on and so forth.

To your point elsewhere, even whether you're primarily seeding or downloading at the moment.

If you can chart it, you can automate it. If you can instruct a user on what to do to resolve an unknown, it can be automated.

I'm _not_ complaining here - it's flabbergating that all of this exists at all. Particularly with the landscape changing and the sand shifting under your feet, e.g. Rogers / Sandvine. Merely pointing out that it can be more automated than it is. I'm certainly not making any comment as to whether it should be automated - utorrent design looking to be lean and mean, after all. Just that it could be (more so).

Used to be dancing bear - people only applauded that it could dance at all. Or, "Wow! P2P exists!"

Now, it's long progressed to the point where how well the bear dances becomes of interest.

Go run uTorrent v1.9 alpha for awhile...with NO upload speed limit (unlimited mode).