How to Pick The Fastest Torrents
Written by Ernesto on July 07, 2009If you follow some basic rules BitTorrent is without a doubt the best way to share large files online. Interestingly, BitTorrent’s inventor Bram Cohen recently noted that torrents with more peers are not always faster. We give some pointers on what torrents will guarantee the best download speeds.
In the past we’ve written many articles on how BitTorrent users can speed up their downloads. In most of these we focused on tweaking the client’s options such as the max upload speed and the maximum number of incoming and outgoing connections.
Many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum, and tweaking your client can indeed help a bit. However, selecting the right torrents is far more important, and those are not necessarily the torrents with the most peers. Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol addresses this common misconception in a recent blog post.
“Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources [...] the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users,” writes Cohen while quoting an erroneous article.
This is indeed an explanation we often hear – the more people who download a file the better – but unfortunately it’s not very accurate. Or to put it in Cohen’s words, this description of BitTorrent is “somewhere between grossly misleading and wrong.”
Cohen goes on to explain why: “There’s a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert they get a better view, then if everybody stood up during a concert they’d all get a better view. This is of course is not true – they wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view.”
So how do you get the most out of BitTorrent then? Or to put it differently, what torrents perform the best and generally give you the fastest download times? We’ll try to explain it as simply as possible leaving math out as much as possible.
The fastest torrents will be those where downloaders (leechers) can tap into the most upload capacity. If you have a swarm (seeders and leechers) with a hundred people in total it will be faster when there are relatively more seeders. Why? Very simply it’s because seeders don’t download while their upload capacity is available for the leechers.
Many people understand these basics. A torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will go faster than one with 10 seeders and 90 leechers (10% seeders). However, it get confusing when you compare swarms of different sizes.
For example, a torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will generally be faster than one with 500 seeders and 2500 leechers (20% seeders). Why? Simply because the swarm has a smaller percentage of seeders. When picking the right torrents to download, the percentage of seeders that a swarm consists of is the most important thing to look at.
A higher percentage of seeders means that the average upload capacity available to the leechers will be higher. The fact that leechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more download capacity than upload capacity. The seeders make the difference.
This is one of the reasons why private trackers generally have such great download speeds. Since users are required to seed as much as possible, they have torrents with 100 seeders and only two or three leechers.
So what can we learn from this? If you’re looking for fast torrents pick those with the best seeder/leecher ratio or the highest percentage of seeders. Or when you don’t have a choice, don’t complain about slow speeds when there are only a few seeders in a large swarm. Perhaps even more importantly, remember to seed as much as possible if you don’t need your upload speed for something else.
Previously: Free Download an iTunes Shot In The Arm For Moby
Next: Judge Rules P2P Legal, Sites To Be Presumed Innocent
97 Responses
Thanks for this
bro co li !
your article is bullshit.
The more peers, the faster the speed… provided your client is set up to bear lots of connections.
I’m sorry to say but this article is all bullshit.
There are so many factors playing role that you just cant tell which one will be fastest.
Sorting the reasons, users have different speeds so if I am in a pool uploading at 1mbps a group of 100 others uploading at 1kbps will by of not much use.
Then again when users are seeding a lot of torrents then inspite of having big pool they contribute very little to upload speed because that speed is divided between a lot of torrents.
taking your own example if all user in 2500+500 upload to you at 0.1 kbps you will be better off using this instead of 70+30 pool with every user giving me at 1kbps.
If you do a little statistical research, you will find that initially download speed will increase with increase in pool size and then decrease exponentially, with peak determined by average upload speed of users and standard deviation of upload speeds.
Some times you TF guys just babble utter nuisance. pfft
I’m sorry to say but this article is all bullshit.
There are so many factors playing role that you just cant tell which one will be fastest.
Sorting the reasons, users have different speeds so if I am in a pool uploading at 1mbps a group of 100 others uploading at 1kbps will by of not much use.
Then again when users are seeding a lot of torrents then inspite of having big pool they contribute very little to upload speed because that speed is divided between a lot of torrents.
taking your own example if all user in 2500+500 upload to you at 0.1 kbps you will be better off using this instead of 70+30 pool with every user giving me at 1kbps.
If you do a little statistical research, you will find that initially download speed will increase with increase in pool size and then decrease exponentially, with peak determined by average upload speed of users and standard deviation of upload speeds.
Some times you TF guys just babble utter nuisance. pfft
Thanks so much for this. Really makes sense. Now if i could just calculate on the fly the percentile, id be OK… :P
“The fact that leechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more upload capacity than download capacity.”
shouldn’t that be “because all peers have more download capacity than upload capacity”?
at least in my experience consumer grade internet connections always have more download bandwidth than upload bandwidth, sometimes up to a 1:10 ratio…
“The fact that lechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more upload capacity than download capacity.”
Peers have more Download capacity then upload you had them reversed there.As asymmetrical broadband is the most widespread leading to a ratio of DL/UL of approximate 10/1
Also this article is not 100% accurate but respect that in most cases is a good hint to a well seeded torrent.
Did you do any testing to verify your claims? I’d like to see hard numbers and statistics, otherwise this just seems like guesswork.
Captain Obvious detected…
Lmao this is common sense. Its sad that people have to explain it on web articles.
What utter bollocks!!!! LOL
Yupp i would also say, that this was not a good Know-how article form TF.
Expected a bit more “Know-how” from a site that covers this point of Internet knowledge
Sorry, but this is (almost)complete crap. The way to get faster torrent downloads is to connect to people with fast upload speeds and you don’t have any control over that. The reason why private trackers are fast is that their ratio requirements and user rank hierarchies encourage members to invest in seedboxes.
I thought this article would tell me something new, even as an experienced torrentuser. I thought it would, really.
Really? hah no, it didnt. nope
A bunch of words thrown together to create total garbage.
If you upload fast then other peers will rapidly have the pieces that you do NOT want. And other peers will then ask seeders for the pieces that you do want. So by uploading to a swarm more will also improve your download speed.
I’ve always downloaded the relevant torrents with most seeds anyway and it seems to work just fine.
This article is also misleading.
Leeches do not rely solely on seeds. The availability of the files is the key.
Seeds are important, without them, you’ll never complete the download. you end up getting a good chunk of data from other leeches, as they pull down segment A from the seed, so you pull down segment A from the leech, which frees up the seed to send out segment B
It all depends on the seeds, but you get a lot of data from the other leeches, this is how torrents work my friends. If every leech had to rely on the seeds for every bit of the download, it would take forever.
Then there’s superseeding, or initial seeding, where the seed uploads until there’s another 100% complete seeder.
Obviously you need to pick your torrents, and you’ll want to look at the AVAILABILITY not just the numbers of peers.
There can be 5600000 seeds, but if they are all seeding slowly, it will be slow.
There can be 1 seed, feeding 100 leeches, you’ll pull down bits from the leeches, as the whole freaking point of bittorrent is to TAKE THE LOAD OF THE SERVER, or in this case, the seed.
Seriously guys, get a grip on the basics.
“The fact that lechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more upload capacity than download capacity.”
that’s a load of crap on so many levels I can’t even begin to start
what a big load of bollocks. why put yourself through so much torment? just get a rapidshare account and max out your bandwidth. easy as pie and lawsuit-free :)
infact if you are a seed and you want to get a better swarm speed, its simple, reduce the No. of peers you are feeding….
i usually set AZ for 3 or 4 at most, and give at least 5Kbit for each peer to share that section f the torrent.
manually kicking peers and even seeds that sit there for hours on large files without giving anything reasonable back for their location is also a good way to weed out the lamers.
you would expect to get given far more from fast norway,us, and sweden peers, than you would from say spain,tailand, an Oz to the UK for instance,so allow for these slower place in your temp time limited kicking.
it would be nice if the devs write and make available to made it easyer to set auto-ban limited timing OC.
as the person watching this traffic your in the best position to see the pattens and set your IP limits OC but then the devs dont seem interested in real innovation, just more of the smae if they add it, ill add it to thinking….
you guys are probably right….the guy that INVENTED bittorrent probably knows less about it than you…..no seriously but for real
Yeah I was starting to think this was a bit of a slow news day. I wonder how many people actually learned anything from this artical?
if misled people can be counted as negative I would say in order of -100.
If TF has run out of topics, we can always talk about China.
also , while we are on this private tracker is faster thing, who was the brain dead dev that choose to use the “private torrent” flag to restrict the use of your private tracker to one single download, that stops you sharing your torrent over your LAN to any and all torrent clients that may have more than one single WAN connection ?.
i have several WAN connection that belong to my local wifi range friends, with any torrent that have the privete flag set in the core torrent file, cant be shared over the far faster Wirless LAN so as to maximise all the WANs upload rates for all to benefit from….
its madness that we have to download it all from the WANs rather than share our seperate sections of the total over the far faster LAN… thats just one on e brain dead example of resticting your overall speeds though badly thought out “private tooreent” flags use….
More seed –> more speed
wow, really? STOP THE PRESS!
can someone say bullshit
“There’s a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert they get a better view, then if everybody stood up during a concert they’d all get a better view. This is of course is not true – they wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view.” – oh comeon, this analogy IS FULL OF BULLSHIT.
You need to grow a fucking brain, why??
BECAUSE THE ONES THAT STAND UP ARE FUCKING LEECHERS.
AND IT SQUITE OBVIOUS THAT IF EVERYONE IS A LEECHER NOONE WILL SEE SHIT (xcept the ones in the front row, so this whole “scene” thing falls apart)
Go back to high school and pick up some proper analogy skills.
Those who are saying crap… don’t really know the abc of torrents and how they work.
BTW for fast torrents use http://moviefox.org
All movies are seeded from 100 mbit seedbox.
i’m staggered at all the people commenting who know more about BitTorrent than its inventor. You are all torrent Einsteins, congrats
“25 Jul 07, 2009 at 20:29 by wow
you guys are probably right….the guy that INVENTED bittorrent probably knows less about it than you…..no seriously but for real
”
OC wow , your making the false assumption that when Bram (Cohen) wrote his proof of concept, and give th code away (we are greatful for that initial code OC) that it was the optimum way to use it , itss clearly not as lots of time has passed….
the problem isnt the POC code, its the fact it seels all the devs have not bothered to really expand improve its core or even TRY different forms of DHT,tunneling, AI swarm code, or even really look into far better grained loacal lan, then wan, then router ip, then ISP section, then etc etc….
do you really care were you get the binary feed as long as you get it?
id much rather be able to get 90% of it off my known local ISP clients, than 90% from Oz, but the core code doesnt allow me to manually force that, or allow me to force my peer to a selection of IPs i know are local to me, before it wants to feed it all through an inter continental set of IPs….
right now if i want o force a 90% local peers, i have tno choic ebut to limit ban all ips and manually allow these locl peers as they appear in my torrent app, thatehr than the other way around.
its got to be better after watching the data flow for a while , to allow you to be able to manually give some of your known Ips a far better chance to get your data over others ips.
TF is the best news source on bittorrent on normal days. Today is not a normal day.
Caution!
Facepalm sensor overloaded.
*no offene intended* ;-P
There are many, MANY different variables that play a role in how fast your torrent download is.
How many files are being simultaneously downloaded at the same time on a peer’s/seeder’s machine?
How many users cap their upload to 5k or less?
How many are using ‘leech only’ bittorrent clients?
How many connections is a seeder allowing per/torrent?
Which countries are the seeders from?
etc.,etc…
Plus bittorrent does not figure in your geographical location when connecting you to peers or seeders. Peers and seeders are connected at random according to who is available at that time, not who is the closest to you or on the same network as you (qwest, comcast…).
Bittorrent just plain suxs a lot of the time and you cannot just boil it down to a black and white scenario where peer-to-seeder ratio is the magic fix.
I just wasted 2 minutes of my life :(
You guys want cheese with that whine?
In general the seed/leech ratio is usually more important then the size of the swarm.
Hardly worth a whole article, but correct never the less. Amusing to see how the comments turned into a freakshow though.
picking fast torrents is BS
but if you eliminate the dead wood in your peer list, you can speed up you downloads.
ie.
in rtorrent select any peer from the torrent’s peer list … if the peer says “Done: 73%” and “Total: 0.0 KB 0.0 KB”
That particular peer is a troll … as in it claims to have 73% of the files but in actuallity it has nothing uploaded and nothing downloaded
in which case pressing “B” bans the sucker!
I guess he thinks everyone has seedboxes. Seedboxes are becoming more widespread though. Everyone should have one I agree.
Seriously… is it just me or are Ernesto’s articles becoming crappier and crappier as they days go by?
Someone please fire him and get a real writer who knows what he/she is talking about.
Ernesto – you are a tool. Period.
’nuff said.
Por lo que pude ver en ALT1040… sos argentino Expatriado… Un gran saludo desde aca…
In theory your right ernesto.. but sadly it never really turns out that way..
plus you got the peer UL/DL capacity backwards.. people have more DOWNLOAD capacity than UPLOAD.. fix that plx ty.
I think you forget who your readers are sometimes ernesto.. i know you always mean well with these kinds of articles.. but sadly you do not enlighten noobs.. noobs stay noobs.. anybody even reading past the subtitle of this article already knows. I mean mabye im wrong.. but any noob ive asked doesnt even know what Torrent Freak is.. and all the cats worth there salt do..
but you know.. who the hell cares anyway in the end.. just download the damn torrent regardless of seeds/peers STFU and wait. Anybody that complains of speed (provided its not crawling at 1 kbps) needs to die.
@43….most ppl who ARE NOT n00bs realize that TF is aimed at pricks like you. Congratulations you fit your own stereotype. $\/\/337.
I’d think each person who uses download techniques other than “point, click, download, be happy” should at least be able to understand the basics of said technique.
Clearly that is not the case with the amount of folks complaining about something as trivial as download speed.
1. I think Torrent Freak released this article only because they didn’t have any real news to tell us about.
2. There are more important things to think about than download speed when selecting a torrent. These things are: File type / quality, Is the file a fake?, Is it password protected, and Is the crack a virus is disguise?
Instead of fluff like this, I would appreciate it if you thoroughly vetted and tested some modern, ultra-cheap/affordable VPNs instead.
ESPECIALLY in light of recent political developments and censorship around the world. What VPN host can we trust not to simply filter out our unencrypted/non-SSL traffic, passwords, emails, etc pp for example?
Not to pass on personal data?(A lot of US hosters/resellers of b/w have that provision btw, despite the VPN host denying it)
And so forth.
In short – how do we find out who is truly on the side of freedom.
Not “How to pick the fastest torrents”, but how to pick the right ally in the fight for all of our digital freedom.
Bro Story Cool :)
Wow! Reading most of these comments made me sad. Come on guys / gals, read the article, take from it what you can, and move on. Every now and then TF fills in with info that you all know, some more than others, but we generally know how things work. You really don’t need to labour the point over and over.
A wise man once said “If you have nothing to say, say nothing”.
Yup, that goes for me too. Lighten up people. There’s too many things up in the air at the moment with recent TPB news etc. Things will come good i’m sure. I have no evidence before you ask BUT I do believe in the community.
Stay strong! Sharing is caring ( with or without TPB )
TF: Looking forward to your next article. Keep it up! I appreciate your efforts!
P.S Where’s Reasoned Mind when you need a valid target to aim at :-)
What a load of bollocks!!!! only way To Speed Up Your Torrents Is Get Dedicated Server (Seedbox) with 100Mbit Up/Down Re Download Your Downloads Vie http://FTP..
@44 Jul 07, 2009 at 21:50 by silly bollock
Yeah thats why YOU are on here posting in the comments trying to flame someone else..
epic f*cking fail and owned yourself..
wow. if only the world knew how much oxygen you were wasting just existing.
“The fact that leechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more upload capacity than download capacity.”
Come on ppl, that is obviously a typo. Are you lamers that stupid to not realize this? TF generally has at least one typo per article.
So then, Ernesto, what’s to differentiate between seed & leech peers in a swarm with regard to 3rd-party client ability to pull data from either, because both seed & leech peers upload whatever data they have to a requesting client at rates as limited by their local and external configuration, none of which has anything to do with their completion status and thus definition as being either a seed, or leech.
Input = Output would be a better explanation. If you have lots of Input (peers uploading data, completion status irrelevant) and conditions allow for it (local & external client/network configuration is good), then you have the ability to Output that .Torrent you’re aiming for in minimal time. Shit ain’t got fook all to do with seeder vs. leecher status. Surely if one actually understood the basic of a BitTorrent swarm then this much would become fairly obvious? Am I wrong?
Here’s a guide…
1. Upload @ ~80% of the capacity of your upstream.
2. Get a decent f*cking ISP, one that doesn’t shape B.T.
3. Get everyone else to do the same.
Waa is all I get from you all..Don’t like it…LUMP IT !!!
37 Jul 07, 2009 at 21:17 by chevron
I just wasted 2 minutes of my life :(
You have and will waste more than half your life. You sad f*ck. Go and Die.
‘Perhaps even more importantly, remember to seed as much as possible if you don’t need your upload speed for something else’
Yeah..Seed until your ARSE BLEEDS.
SEED YOU F*CKERS SEED.
join random private site, download torrents, sure theres only one seed but that seed normally has a 100mb box feeding the sites torrents
Announce
Same as “scrape” (see below), but a client also announces that it wants to join the swarm and that server should add it to the list of peers in that swarm.
Choked
Describes a peer to whom the client refuses to send file pieces. A client chokes another client in several situations:
* The second client is a seed, in which case it does not want any pieces (ie. it is completely uninterested)
* The client is already uploading at its full capacity (it has reached the value of max_uploads)
* The second client has been blacklisted for being abusive or is using a blacklisted BitTorrent client.
Client
The program that enables p2p file sharing via the BitTorrent protocol. Examples of clients include µTorrent and Vuze.
[edit] Downloader
A downloader is any peer that does not have the entire file and is downloading the file. This term, used in Bram Cohen’s Python implementation, lacks the negative connotation attributed to leech. Bram prefers downloader to leech because BitTorrent’s tit-for-tat ensures downloaders also upload and thus do not unfairly qualify as leeches.
End Game
Bittorrent has a couple[which?] of download strategies for initializing a download, downloading normally among the middle of the torrent, and downloading the last few pieces (see below) of a torrent. Typically, the last download pieces arrive more slowly than the others since the faster and more easily accessible pieces should have already been obtained, so to prevent this, the BitTorrent client attempts to get the last missing pieces from all of its peers. Upon receiving a piece, a cancel request command is sent to other peers.
Hash
The hash is a string of alphanumeric characters in the .torrent file that the client uses to verify the data that is being transferred. It contains information like the file list, sizes, pieces, etc. Every piece received is first checked against the hash. If it fails verification, the data is discarded and requested again. The ‘Hash Fails’ field in the torrent General tab shows the number of these hash fails.
Hash checks greatly reduce the chance that invalid data is incorrectly identified as valid by the BitTorrent client, but it is still possible for invalid data to have the same hash value as the valid data and be treated as such. This is known as a hash collision.
Index
An index is a list of .torrent files (usually including descriptions and other information) managed by a website and available for searches. An index website can also be a tracker.
Interested
Describes a downloader who wishes to obtain pieces of a file the client has. For example, the uploading client would flag a downloading client as ‘interested’ if that client did not possess a piece that it did, and wished to obtain it.
Leech
A leech is a term with two meanings. Usually it is used to refer a peer who has a negative effect on the swarm by having a very poor share ratio – in other words, downloading much more than they upload. Most leeches are users on asymmetric internet connections and do not leave their BitTorrent client open to seed the file after their download has completed. However, some leeches intentionally avoid uploading by using modified clients or excessively limiting their upload speed. However the often used second meaning of leech is synonymous with downloader (see above) – used simply to describe a peer – or any client that does not have 100% of the data. This alternative meaning was mainly introduced by most BitTorrent tracker sites using term leech in this sense.
Lurker
A lurker is a user that only downloads files from the group but does not add new content. Unlike a leech, a lurker will seed what he or she has downloaded.
p2p
Stands for “peer to peer”, which is the technology used for file sharing among computer users over the internet.
Peer
A peer is one instance of a BitTorrent client running on a computer on the Internet to which other clients connect and transfer data. Usually a peer does not have the complete file, but only parts of it. However, in the colloquial definition, “peer” can be used to refer to any participant in the swarm (in this case, it’s synonymous with “client”).
Piece
This refers to the torrented files being divided up into equal specific sized pieces (e.g. 512Kb, 1Mb). The pieces are distributed in a random fashion among peers in order to optimize trading efficiency.
Scrape
This is when a client sends a request to the tracking server for information about the statistics of the torrent, such as with whom to share the file and how well those other users are sharing.
Seeder
A seeder is a peer that has a complete copy of the torrent and still offers it for upload. The more seeders there are, the better the chances of getting a higher download speed.
Share ratio
A user’s share ratio for any individual torrent is a number determined by dividing the amount of data that user has uploaded by the amount of data they have downloaded. Final share ratios over 1 carry a positive connotation in the BitTorrent community because they indicate that the user has sent more data to other users than they received. Likewise, share ratios under 1 have a negative connotation.
Snubbed
An uploading client is flagged as snubbed if the downloading client has not received any data from it in over 60 seconds.
Super-seeding
When a file is new, much time can be wasted because the seeding client might send the same file piece to many different peers, while other pieces have not yet been downloaded at all. Some clients, like ABC, Vuze, BitTornado, TorrentStorm, and µTorrent have a “super-seed” mode, where they try to only send out pieces that have never been sent out before, theoretically making the initial propagation of the file much faster. However the super-seeding becomes substantially less effective and may even reduce performance compared to the normal “rarest first” model in cases where some peers have poor or limited connectivity. This mode is generally used only for a new torrent, or one which must be re-seeded because no other seeds are available.
Swarm
Together, all peers (including seeders) sharing a torrent are called a swarm. For example, six ordinary peers and two seeders make a swarm of eight.
Torrent
A torrent can mean either a .torrent metadata file or all files described by it, depending on context. The torrent file contains metadata about all the files it makes downloadable, including their names and sizes and checksums of all pieces in the torrent. It also contains the address of a tracker that coordinates communication between the peers in the swarm.
Tracker
A tracker is a server that keeps track of which seeds and peers are in the swarm. Clients report information to the tracker periodically and in exchange receive information about other clients to which they can connect. The tracker is not directly involved in the data transfer and does not have a copy of the file.
Thanks for this. Even if I knew about this before, its good to see that the people new to torrents can just right in and know what to look for when trying to get speed.
Wow. A lot of these commenters seem to be misunderstanding what Bram was saying.
imagine if everyone’s upload speed is 10kbps.
in a swarm with 100 seeds and 900 leeches, the overall download speed would be 1000*10kbps (10000kbps) divided by 90, leaving an average of 11.1kbps per leech.
in a swarm with 50 seeds and 50 leeches, the overall download speed would be 100*10kbps (1000kbps) divided by 50, leaving an average of 20kbps per leech.
The best thing to do is just upload as much as you can. Swarms tend to work on the honour system. Even if your client wasn’t intended to, it’ll very likely still follow this rule.
tell ya what, next time you are downloading a popular torrent, look at your peers list in your client and watch who you are downloading from, in utorrent is shows you what percent that user has of the file
Your client wants pieces of the file, at the best speeds possible, which is not always from the seeds
analized the bittorrent protocol for making an informal, non-technical presentation once.
Well, you have to keep in mind one thing: it’s not actually the seeder-leech rate. In a more advanced fashion, it’s the total availability of the parts times the avarage upload speed of the swarm. What does this mean? Well, if you have ONE single seeder (1.0 avail) seeding at 100kbps but everyone in the swarm (say 129837 leechs) have a symetrical 100/100 connection, everyone will get 100kbps down.
But well, that’s not what happens with most torrents. So what Cohen said stands true – better seeder ratio means there usually will be faster dl speeds. Interestingly this isn’t too much true for private trackers, where usuers have more symetrical connections (better upload).
“This is one of the reasons why private trackers generally have such great download speeds. Since users are required to seed as much as possible, they have torrents with 100 seeders and only two or three leechers.”
From my experience, YES, this is true. HOWEVER: Because public torrents have more sharing than private, it may take twice as long to download from public, but seeding always gives me a higher ratio on public trackers, where private trackers only have a limited number of users, and my ratio suffers b/c there are fewer users to seed back too.
Sometimes I d/l private to watch Tru Bloodz right away, but also d/l the public one, just so I can give back more the the community. (GET A PROXY SERVICE! FUCK YOU HBO!)
I have a question for some experience torrent users out there.
Im using uTorrent client.Im not getting good speeds from any torrents now. Whats the best number of maximum connections?
This is my settings now:
Global maximum number of connections – 600
Maximum number of connected peers per torrent – 100
Number of upload slots per torrent – 6
Is that good or should i put lower number of connections?
The idea that everyone should seed rather than “leech” is a fallacy too. Seeders are important, but without peers (what most people call leechers), all the seeds are just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts. There’s no point in seeding if there are no peers to download from you. This is why I’ve never understood why peers are looked down on so much. Who are the seeders seeding for, if not the so-called leechers?
One improvement I’d like to see, is for BT clients to automatically allocate bandwidth for each torrent, based on the number of seeds each one has, to the point of dedicating all the bandwidth to low seed torrents and not giving any to torrents with many seeds. This could of course be overridden manually. Right now, I’m downloading a torrent with 3 seeds and 8 peers. This was the only torrent I could find for these files, so picking a different torrent isn’t an option. Right now, I’m connected to 2 seeds and 0 peers. My download speed is 5-9K/s. Since no IP addresses have been blocked by the IP filter, I have to assume the reason I’m not connecting to any of the peers is that all their upload slots have already been allocated to other files.
It seems that probably 75% of the torrents I download using public trackers are like this. Admittedly, I download some obscure stuff, but even movies from a couple years ago are the same way. I see people complaining because they can’t max out their 15Mbit connections, while I’m happy if the download speed breaks 100K/s!
yeah i agree Rekrul.
although the peer/leech thing are just people mixing a real ‘leech’ (a peer that does not give back or is going to HIT and RUN)
with a real peer (someone who gives back more then they took)
Your always, ALWAYS supposed to give back a little more then what was taken at very minimum, if everyone did that, torrents would rarely die.
Its all about patience.
it’s basic logic, of course seeding is vital.. the article says about the newest movie rips etc, with big leech numbers that get stuck sometimes.
the concert example is stupid i stand up at any concert, no matter where i’m situated most times i’m right up in front or wherever the pit is hehe. a better analogy would be like.. city streets car traffic or something
so how about combining torrents with nodes. logic says dividing the seed is good – no matter how small you share, it goes faster. i know it’s not my idea lol
For some reason I tend to get more out of my peers than my seeds. Half the time I’ll be connected to 10 seeds but only be downloading from 1 of them, while my peers consistently upload to me.
http://www.gotorrent.com has torrent speed info that is fairly accurate
“For example, a torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will generally be faster than one with 500 seeders and 2500 leechers (20% seeders).”
In my experience, it’s just the opposite. Even though one has a higher ratio, having more seeders (at a similar ratio) means that the torrent will be faster, since it’s more likely that some of those seeders will be geographically closer to me. Additionally, the larger no. of seeders means that they have more whole copies between all of them, so the greater no. also increases the uploaded data they receive from each other.
@66 I couldn’t agree more. Speeds would be much better if the people that hit and run would stick around. Or my favorite, the people that set their client up so their not uploading at all. I love being connected to 30 or 40 people and can only get pieces from 1 or 2. On paper the article makes sense but in reality there’s just too many variables.
what a terrible story.
this *would* be true, if all the people listed as leechers were people who were actively still downloading (and therefore taking up a lot of the seeders’ bandwidth themselves), but a lot of the time they are just partial seeders (people who have just chose to download part of the files). as you haven’t done ANY research to determine how many, on average, peers listed as leechers are actively downloading or just partial seeders, you article is baseless rubbish.
Wow! Lots of post on this.
oc the toorent devs cant even be bothered to really innovate with new retrofitted alpha/beta test apps with multicasting DHT tunnels or even classic p2p web servers for our easy front ends to decentralised retrofited mutiticast tunnels
http://www.keyforum.net/index.php?act=news&ln=eng
http ://bamboo-dht.org/tutorial.html
http ://www.cdt.luth.se/~peppar/progs/mTunnel/
http ://www.rebolfrance.info/org/articles/multicast/multicast.html
The problem is all the “elite” who seed hard on their private trackers, then hit and run on public trackers because they’re “saving their bandwidth for private” – effectively perpetuating the problem that they were trying to avoid.
Private trackers suck :(
the article is vague and pointless.
you’re not teaching us anything.rather the opposite
i vote
not so cool story
Hot Story bro :)
Or you can visit a 1GB direct download torrent site like http://zoomtorrents.com.
They’re just like some dork sitting in his bedroom with tons of files, only they have a HUGE pipe to the web and you get your stuff FAST!
NICE STORY SO YOU TEACH MORE PEOPLE HOW IT WORKS!
Ernesto, just confess that you’re a windoz noob! and you will be redeemed of your sins
It’s a shame most of the posters here do not have an idea of how the bit torrent protocol work. Perhaps many of you need to take a class on networks and protocols. Then come back on comment on the story.
i dont wan’t an explanation or article on how this works, but will someone simply let me know what my connections should be set at?
From my experience, this is true.
You need to take into consideration that while a peer is eager to download, not all of them provide that one 10th of upload bandwidth they have.
For example, out of a 10000 peers, only 1 or 2 thousand will seed, which means they don’t mind uploading, while the rest of 8 thousand will be hit’n'runners and most certainly they will cap upload speeds, thereby limiting overall swarm speed.
Looking at Weeds’ latest ep, 11337 lolz finished and only 3600 seeding…
I try to find torrents with more seeders than leechers or at least a balanced 1:1 s/p ratio
Another thing I hate is how you go to a torrent search site, find exactly what you want, it says there are 20 seeds and 50 peers, so you download it only to find out that there are 2 seeds and 5 peers. Why did the site tell you that there were 20 seeds? Because there are ten trackers in the torrent, all with the same two seeds and the site counted them all as separate seeds! Even on sites that accurately report the number of seeds & peers at the time the tracker was asked, it seems like they only update once a week or so, because as soon as you click the Update button, the number of seeds and peers drops to 1/2 or even 1/4 of the previous numbers.
There is something else this article does not consider when choosing a so called “fast torrent”: The location of the seeds and peers. If you are downloading from seeds that are basically on the other side of the world, then your speed is going to be MUCH lower than if they are all within the same country. That isn’t really something you can determine though unless you start downloading and look at who you are connected to.
was an article really necessary for something that obvious? i was reading this hoping it would actually have something that couldn’t be figured out by the average 10 year old.
how fast you download depend on many factor not just seed and peer
you can leech with a dialup from 100 peer and you won’t see much faster then 5kb/sec
someone really need to do more research when writing an article about how torrent works
some people don’t know how to open port so that affect them adversely
those of different isp and from another country will often limit your connection speed to that of ADSL 1.5mpbs or slower even if you have 100mb symmetric connection
so many thing that affect user connection… I don’t have time to cover it all.. that’s for others to figure out.
dude here made a greasemonkey script for FF/other for mininova
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25660
it has a ratio option, because I suggested it !!!!!!!
ok x, post it on rlslog
This article describes a rule of thumb of course, and that dosen´t fit every users scenario.
Also as djnforce9 touches in his comment, basicly the only thing you can determine is the seeder/lecheer ratio.
ten four!
I just wish people thought before they left some of these comments or actualy read and understood what was said.
Please stop bashing this article guys. Ernesto Does know what he is talking about.
http://www.plentyoftorrents.com
or get an invite to a private site where most members use 100mb seed boxes ;D
This article is completely disconnected from reality.
In the spirit of “Sharing is caring”, let me describe a method that really works:
Step 1 – move to Scandinavia.
Step 2 – Download only from “SweSub” torrents.
Note that Scandinavian people don’t actually need the subtitles, but they use them extremely efficiently for filtering away people from other regions of the world, and so you can watch your average DL speed jump from 30 to 900 KB/s just by this simple trick.
Of course, it could take a bit of an initial investment.
how about just picking the torrents that have the most seeders? it seems to work for me every time.
This article is all shit, its not true!
How about picking the most seeds?
It works and picking the one with the most peer is not true!
Picking the one with the most peer is no where going to work. You got to pick the one with the most seeders.
But you do have a point.
http://www.entertane.com – the easiest site for torrents (movies, music, software, games, xxx) – faster, simpler – and you can search all your favorite torrent sites. No registration needed.
Nice article for people just starting out, many thanks.
As for the so called experts!
I think i’d rather listen to the guy that invented the protocol than some idiot that has not invented anything and would like to amaze us with his knowledge of nothing apart from being able to download 8-)
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