Something about uTorrent...

[jupiter999]

Sorry if I asking the same question...
I'm using uTorrent 1.8.1 right now, and downloading a big file with 3 seeds.
But I'm curious Why I rarely get download stream from those seeds?
Can I actually control to choose preferable peer?

 

[Fuurin]

I think most torrent clients handle things like that automatically. You get little bits and pieces from different seeds. The more you upload on that torrent, the faster your downloads should be. Also seeders with initial seeding turned on will only upload to you if you've shared all the parts you've received so far.

 

[guy]

Seeding clients automatically issue a "choke" (x) flag to peers connected in the swarm. This has two purposes:
1) Make the swarm more efficient. If the seed only uploads to you, then all other peers must download from you, and if your upload capacity is very low, then the whole torrent slows down.
2) Keep the torrent more secure. If the seed only uploads to you, then if you disconnected immediately after finishing the download, everyone else will be left with missing parts that you didn't upload (which the seed will have to upload again).

If you want, uTorrent will allow you to create a blocklist to disable connections to certain IPs. So you could theoretically block connections to all other peers and only enable connection to the seeds. But if you download the entire video only from the a seed, that's called a direct download, not a torrent.

The whole point of the torrent is that you download parts from all your peers, which is why the seeds will periodically block you in order to upload to others, and why it is counter-productive to block peers.

 

[jupiter999]

Thanks for your enlightening explanation, guy~

 

[clint999]

I think most torrent clients handle things like that automatically. You get little bits and pieces from different seeds. The more you upload on that torrent, the faster your downloads should be. Also seeders with initial seeding turned on will only upload to you if you've shared all the parts you've received so far.

 

[jupiter999]

But some tutorial from various article reports that upload limit should not be set to maximum, as it will be eating your download stream sometimes...
Is this true?

 

[guy]

That depends greatly on your ISP, the type of connection (cable, dsl, ftth), and your router's specifications. In general, it is not the raw upload speed but the number of connections that will affect your download speed. For instance, uploading to an FTP at full speed should not greatly affect your download speed, but uploading small amounts to 20-30 peers at once will create a lot of overhead and your network card may slow as a result.

But there are many ISPs that use traffic shaping rules which will slow you down if you upload at max capacity for a long period of time (15min - 1hr+) -- and they tend to target the bittorrent protocol. Then again, performance can still vary from one torrent to another.

Basically, if you suspect your download is unusually slow, you may try to limit your upload. But there's no guarantee it will help speed up the download, and there's no need to limit the upload speed permanently.

 

[jupiter999]

I think what you said makes sense, guy. So I end up monitoring the torrent speed from time to time by adjusting the upload speed to get max download. I usually change the up speed by only 1KB/s each time to get a more stable readings...
Not sure am I doing something unusual or not...