Thread: BitTorrent Problems!

Am using Maxnet 256/128. Azureus ratio 2.163, NAT ok.

Last 11 hours I download 8mb, but still remember the good old days on a basic 56k connection where I would routinely reach speeds of 40kps.

That's the one I've got and I consistently gewt over 20kb/s....

Frankie has just upgraded to the 1 mb and claims to be getting 80 kb/s.
I shall upgrade next month. It's only 400 baht more.

Originally Posted by keda

56k connection where I would routinely reach speeds of 40kps.

I find that difficult to believe.
I got closer to 1 kb/s.

are you sure that the 40 wasn't your connection speed?

Nope, somehow the CSL pack zipped along several times faster than ADSL, or my ADSL.

I did consider upgrading, but my slowness is probably more a software job than service.

Look at the list of peers and perhaps that can answer your question. You might be hitting a torrent where all the seeds have slow uploads to you.

If the ratio is like 10 seeds / 100 leechers you aren't going to go anywhere fast.

Originally Posted by surasak

You might be hitting a torrent where all the seeds have slow uploads to you.

You seem to have totally misunderstood the torrent principle.
What a seed gives to a leacher should be shared by that leacher to other leachers , and I don't believe that the upload speed from all participants to you are slow..
But of course, nodes put priority in communication with other nodes that are sharing. So if you don't give you will get very little..

Originally Posted by surasak

If the ratio is like 10 seeds / 100 leechers you aren't going to go anywhere fast.

Bollox ! A torrent really only need 1 seed at any time.
If the leachers are not cheating , that is.

What are you smoking? One seed cannot necessarily feed 100 or even 1000 leechers well. Are you suggesting a seed on dial up can feed lots of leechers? Even a seeder on DSL isn't going to do much if there's a huge swarm of leechers.

The theory is that one seed passes a piece to one leecher and in turn that same piece can be passed onto subsequent leechers until all leechers have that piece. In reality it doesn't work that way due to overhead.

I've been working on a 1GB torrent for over 2 days now. There are currently 49 seeds and almost 500 leechers. My download speed is less than 4k/sec (in fact I'm uploading more than I'm getting at this point).

In contrast last week a Thai movie torrent with 10 seeds and myself as being the only leecher resulted in a 4GB download in about 24 hours.

Since you cannot know the completion % of the leechers connected to you it's therefore important to connect to a swam with a high ratio of seeds to leechers.

Also, you must take into account reality: if you have a 1:1 ratio on your torrent it doesn't mean you uploaded a complete file exactly as you downloaded....for example, say a torrent is made up of 1000 pieces. You could have simply uploaded the same piece 1000 times and as such uploaded the same amount of data as you downloaded despite the fact that it wasn't 100% identical to the whole file.

Originally Posted by surasak

The theory is that one seed passes a piece to one leecher and in turn that same piece can be passed onto subsequent leechers until all leechers have that piece. In reality it doesn't work that way due to overhead.

What overhead ?
The only overhead there is , is the protocol overhead and it is very small.
But if you say that 70% of the swarm is not sharing properly, then I can agree with you. That is the major reason for slow downloads.

Originally Posted by surasak

Since you cannot know the completion % of the leechers connected to you it's therefore important to connect to a swam with a high ratio of seeds to leechers.

Every node knows exactly what pieces all the other nodes in the swarm has, and therefore also knows their exact completion.
You are very wrong if you believe that it is better to be connected to a lot of nodes with 100% completion ( ie seeds) than to other leachers.

All bittorrent clients are searching for, and putting priority to nodes with which they can have a two-way communication. Nodes from whom they try to get the least available piece in order to share it with other nodes and get other pieces from them. Usually you will be connected to such nodes until there is nothing more to share between them and you.
But if you don't give them something at a resonable speed, they will try to find better partners to share with !!

The principle for a seed in bittorrent is that he should spread the pieces over many leachers and let them do the job of sharing with each other.
Seeds do monitor how fast a certain node do the sharing of a recent received piece. Nodes that can redistribute fast will get priority from the seed. Slow nodes will be ignored or get very low priority.

Originally Posted by surasak

I've been working on a 1GB torrent for over 2 days now. There are currently 49 seeds and almost 500 leechers. My download speed is less than 4k/sec (in fact I'm uploading more than I'm getting at this point).

That is the problem with too big swarms, they become slow.
But there is a lot one can do to improve the situation and become a node that many nodes want to communicate with.
One important thing is to make sure that you have a decent up-speed, remember that the bittorrent protocol starts to get efficient at around 2Kbyte/second. Anything lower than that is just a waste of resources.
Lower the number of outgoing connections to make sure you don't fall below 2K. Reduce the number of torrents you are running in parallell.
And maybe most important, reduce the number of allowed incoming connections.
There are very few routers on the market that can cope with 500 connections, most of them start to choke around 50 !

The problem I notice is that the seeds/leechers change consistently. If you had the same group of seeds/leechers connected for enough time then everyone would get a full download.

Just in the past hour on the aforementioned 1GB torrent the seeds have dropped down to 2 and the leechers have gone up. In my particular swarm there's only 2 people that have more than I do. The rest of them are sending me nothing and they come from different IPs now. So, I'm getting nowhere because the group I'm in right now doens't have much to send to me. I'm sending out more than I'm getting.

If the pieces were really being distributed equally it should be theretically possible to complete a download with no active seeds. However, I have had torrents in the past get stuck and never reach 100% or even 90%. Thus, without some seeds, the distribution can never be finished to those who don't have a complete download (and I'm referring to torrents that show thousands of completed downloads according to the tracker).

If everyone had equivalent upload and download speeds then it would work better. But the flaw here is that not everyone can upload as fast as they can download (I can't because my DSL speeds are 768 down/128 up). So, I generally can never contribute all that much (in a recently completed torrent I managed a .068 ratio since there were plenty of seeds and few leechers).

Originally Posted by surasak

Even a seeder on DSL isn't going to do much if there's a huge swarm of leechers.

The swarm speed can of course never get higher than the original seeders speed.

Originally Posted by surasak

Also, you must take into account reality: if you have a 1:1 ratio on your torrent it doesn't mean you uploaded a complete file exactly as you downloaded....for example, say a torrent is made up of 1000 pieces. You could have simply uploaded the same piece 1000 times and as such uploaded the same amount of data as you downloaded despite the fact that it wasn't 100% identical to the whole file.

Of course. But since you have uploaded that piece to 1000 nodes, those nodes would have used their time to upload other pieces since they didn't have to do that certain piece which you took care of so good.
What matters is that you give as much as you take.
If you don't , then you have put the burden of your responsibility onto other nodes. If the overall share ratio is less than 1:1, then that torrent is predestinated to die..

Originally Posted by surasak

If the pieces were really being distributed equally it should be theretically possible to complete a download with no active seeds.

Yes it is and I have done that so many times.
In a similar way, I have downloaded complete torrents without ever beeing connected to the single original seeder. It is enough for the swarm that one of the nodes has communication with the seeder, if that leacher can redistribute with reasonable speed. I'm downloading a torrent right now where I can't communicate with the seeder. But there is another node that can and he is sending to me with very good speed. I see his completion growing and he will soon become a second seeder so I do not worry at all about not being connected to the seeder.

Originally Posted by surasak

If everyone had equivalent upload and download speeds then it would work better. But the flaw here is that not everyone can upload as fast as they can download (I can't because my DSL speeds are 768 down/128 up). So, I generally can never contribute all that much (in a recently completed torrent I managed a .068 ratio since there were plenty of seeds and few leechers).

That is only a bad excuse surasak.
You are supposed to keep at least a 1:1 ratio, if not then you are parasiting, stealing from the community.
Your 1:6 assymetrical dsl tells me that you need to keep seeding 6 times longer than the time it took you to download..
Or limit your download speed so it matches your upload speed..
The flaw as you call it, is that people take for granted that it is their right to continiously download with higher speed than they upload with.

Supposed to keep a 1:1 ratio? Pray tell, how does one do that without a 1:1 ratio of upstream/downstream? It's not my problem that my ISP won't offer higher upstream.

In the real world my speeds are more like 100kbps down/8-10kbps up. If I limit my downloads then it sucks up bandwidth for a longer time that someone else could use to finish theirs faster. That means some other fool has to wait 10 days to finish a download since I'm taking that long. I think it would be rude to limit download speeds. I've never heard of a single person ever doing that.

Like I'm going to stop downloading for 10 days just to seed something so that I've hit a 1:1 ratio? Completely hose the upstream so that it becomes impossible to even use a web browser? I don't think so.

Originally Posted by surasak

Supposed to keep a 1:1 ratio? Pray tell, how does one do that without a 1:1 ratio of upstream/downstream?

I gave you a few hints how to do it..

Originally Posted by surasak

It's not my problem that my ISP won't offer higher upstream.

I see. So it's ok that it becomes someone elses problem ?
Someone has to do what you're not doing..

Originally Posted by surasak

Like I'm going to stop downloading for 10 days just to seed something so that I've hit a 1:1 ratio?

Yes, if that is what is needed. Do you think you have a constitutional right to download all the time without uploading the same amount ?

Surasak, I have used bittorrent since the very very beginning.
It was extremely fast then when there were only a couple of thousand enthusiasts using it. All of them honouring the sharing principle.
That lasted for around 6 month , then the first hacked cheating client appeared. Together with the moron users from Kazaa, WinMx, and Limewire with their misconfigured torrent clients.
Today, a really good swarm contains only 60% of those morons..
A bad one up to 90%..
And everyone is complaining, asking why bittorrent is so slow..

Originally Posted by surasak

Completely hose the upstream so that it becomes impossible to even use a web browser? I don't think so.

Just another common excuse., I've heard them all before..
"But I need some bandwidth for my other applications".
Yes, but while your web browser sends a request packet of around 1Kb or less, you will receive a reply which usually is 100 - 1000 times greater.
Maybe it is the download you should cap in your torrent client ?

Now read it again, "honouring the sharing principle".
Too communistic for a seppo I guess

Were you ever a part of the P2P scene back in the early 1990s? Ratios never existed until torrents and other P2P apps such as eMule become available. P2P apps in the 1990s were based on give and take. The idea was to make a collection of things available for download. If you had a file that wasn't available on the server you joined then you uploaded that. That was sufficient back in the day. Even if you had nothing to offer it really didn't matter as the idea was focused on sharing. This was the best P2P system that ever existed and it's a damn shame it's gone.

Ever since Kazaa/emule/Bittorrent came available the notion that someone should give as much as they take came into play. It's a nonsensical scheme that is impossible for every user to reach simply because not every torrent has high demand. As I stated the Thai movie I downloaded resulted in my upload of about 300MB of data for a download of 4.5GB. Even when I left the item to seed nobody was leeching from me for days. If I follow your thinking it would mean I could never download anything again if nobody downloaded the movie again since I could never reach a 1:1 ratio. It's absurd.

Ratios are crap. The sharing principle means that you give and take...not that you give 100% of what you take. Most clients require that you upload a certain amount to download a certain amount. If there is nobody downloading then I should not have to wait until I reach 1:1 just to start downloading something else. Modern P2P apps force you to at least give something up because it's acknolwedged that not everyone has the same amount of bandwidth available.

Originally Posted by lom

You are very wrong if you believe that it is better to be connected to a lot of nodes with 100% completion ( ie seeds) than to other leachers.

Wouldn't a seed give you a higher probability to complete your download since other leechers might only be partial ? I think this is the whole purpose of seeding, it's to help complete the download, without them you would have little chance to finish your download if there were not enough seeders in the past to spread all the parts to the leechers.

Originally Posted by surasak

If the pieces were really being distributed equally it should be theretically possible to complete a download with no active seeds. However, I have had torrents in the past get stuck and never reach 100% or even 90%.

See my comments above, not enough seeds decrease your probability to complete your download if all the leechers are partial because seeding was insufficient. Basically all leechers are sharing the same partial parts, totally useless since no seeders has been there long enough to spread their 100% download. Therefore you need a lot of seeders to successfully complete a download through time. Time is key in torrent.

By the way, I am using uTorrent now and it's great.

Yes, of course, I have several torrents which will not complete because there are no seeds. Been that way for weeks; I finally gave up on them.

One might complete a torrent if there are no seeds but it's highly unlikely.

If you switch BT clients, will unfinished downloads be compatible with the new one, or is it a heave and a sigh and start all over?

Originally Posted by keda

a heave and a sigh and start all over

Yes, that's what it is. But you can of course run them both for a short time while your finnishing your downloads. Just set them up on different ports.

You can complete a download if you change clients. You'll need to copy the torrent's 'xxx.torrent' file to the new client's torrent folder and then copy the downloaded contents over to the new client's download directory. I've done this with uTorrent, Bitlord, and BitComet with no issues.

Originally Posted by Butterfly

Basically all leechers are sharing the same partial parts

Sorry but that's wrong. With Azureus, in the "Details" tab you can see which pieces you have compared to the other leechers. I download a torrent now who is only 16% completed and I can see that I have pieces that other leechers with 75% completion doesn't have and a leecher with 4.5% completed have pieces that I don't have. We have also pieces in common. So actually I download from the sources (seeders) and from all other leechers, more or less advanced than me.

Originally Posted by surasak

I've done this with uTorrent, Bitlord, and BitComet with no issues.

As far as I know, uTorrent has quite a different format for their "pieces" than the other two. BitLord is BitComet so no big surprise that you can copy between those.

Originally Posted by Wallalai

Originally Posted by Butterfly

Basically all leechers are sharing the same partial parts

Sorry but that's wrong. With Azureus, in the "Details" tab you can see which pieces you have compared to the other leechers. I download a torrent now who is only 16% completed and I can see that I have pieces that other leechers with 75% completion doesn't have and a leecher with 4.5% completed have pieces that I don't have. We have also pieces in common. So actually I download from the sources (seeders) and from all other leechers, more or less advanced than me.

I think it's often true, too. I have three torrents "stuck".

One is at 81.1% and all other peers have exactly the same pieces as me.
Ditto another at 99.7% (3 peers, all missing one piece), and one at 99.4% (several peers all missing 7 pieces).

I even sent a message to the original seeder of one of them to ask him/her to re-seed, but no luck.

How do you resume - AzureusWiki

This goes into more detail about what I posted.

Originally Posted by RDN

I think it's often true, too. I have three torrents "stuck". One is at 81.1% and all other peers have exactly the same pieces as me. Ditto another at 99.7% (3 peers, all missing one piece), and one at 99.4% (several peers all missing 7 pieces).

Can happen if there is no more source (100% completed torrent), I avoid torrents without at least 1 source. And it's why I try to share at least as much ore more than I've downloaded, to allow other leechers less advanced than me to complete the download. Actually I'm seeding 5 torrents and one is nearly completed.
I'v tried uTorrent but it seems that I've a far less download rate than with Azureus, don't know why ?

Originally Posted by lom

Originally Posted by surasak

I've done this with uTorrent, Bitlord, and BitComet with no issues.

As far as I know, uTorrent has quite a different format for their "pieces" than the other two. BitLord is BitComet so no big surprise that you can copy between those.

I'v done it with uTorrent and Azureus too.