Hi Gang, No worries about my download speeds or connectivity. This is more of a general question about the health or otherwise of the Bit Torrent community. In particular those - well let's be brutal here, the VAST MAJORITY who use cut down minimal interface bit torrent clients and perhaps are not very technical.
Please view the image I have uploaded with this post.
Q. Why are so many peers all downloading bits in sequence and not at random like the faster peers on the top of the list?
Q. With 31 peers and only myself and an 8 megabits per second upload bandwidth to service them all, WHY could I not use super seeding, the vast majority of those stuck on the 42% region would not upload when offered a super seed bit.
I wonder if this is some trend as it is very frustrating to seed to a swarm at 8 mbps and find that the average swarm speed is down to dial up speeds. I know it is nothing I am doing wrong, Latest beta version of VUZE. Advanced user and network test is just fine. My ports are all open and as you can see a minority of peers are getting good download speeds from me. Any advice would be welcome. Kind regards..
Is it a multi-file torrent? Perhaps the people 'stuck' on 42% are have actually only selected the first file or two for download and are effectively complete? Or can you see them making sequential progress?
10-20-2015, 05:14 PM (This post was last modified: 10-20-2015, 05:15 PM by iMS Malta.)
Yes it has over 1000 files, but I can see no way that they would ALL select the exact amount of files. In any rate they are all advancing very slowly and the guys at the top of the picture have now already reached 100% and are seeding. My question again is why are they downloading the bits in numerical sequence and not at random like the peers you see with the higher percentages or download speeds?
Why can't they download from me when I super seed and appear to them as a fellow peer and not a seed?
Is this a growing trend in Bit Torrent than most users have no idea what the heck they are doing, or is this my fault and is there anything I can do at my end to bring average swarm speeds back to the good old days when with a few peers gathered around my maximum upload speed and then some was the average swarm speed! These peers are downloading at dial up speeds.
I tried Micro Torrent, correctly set up, with the same torrent and got exactly the same results and the 'Initial Seed' feature also got nowhere with the bunch all grouped together in the 42% Region. Before this I tried a smaller 1GB size torrent, but again the same bunch peers just slowing the swarm down.
Very odd - those 42% peers must be up to no good - call them up!
The thing with super-seeding is that it works by Vuze 'lying' to peers about what pieces it has. Rather than saying 'I have all the pieces, pick what you want' Vuze says 'I only have this (random rare) piece, you'll have to pick that one if you're going to ask me for anything'
A 'normal' peer would take the hint and most likely follow your suggestion. But of course they don't have to. If they have some overriding sequential download behaviour then they will most likely ignore you as the piece you offer them won't be their next one...
Nothing you can do about it - BitTorrent works by peers requesting stuff, you can't 'push' data to peers.
10-20-2015, 08:56 PM (This post was last modified: 10-20-2015, 08:59 PM by iMS Malta.)
(10-20-2015, 05:44 PM)'parg' Wrote: Very odd - those 42% peers must be up to no good - call them up!
The thing with super-seeding is that it works by Vuze 'lying' to peers about what pieces it has. Rather than saying 'I have all the pieces, pick what you want' Vuze says 'I only have this (random rare) piece, you'll have to pick that one if you're going to ask me for anything'
A 'normal' peer would take the hint and most likely follow your suggestion. But of course they don't have to. If they have some overriding sequential download behaviour then they will most likely ignore you as the piece you offer them won't be their next one...
Nothing you can do about it - BitTorrent works by peers requesting stuff, you can't 'push' data to peers.
OK on that. Pity. Just seems that the download speeds are pretty pathetic on Karaoke swarms. When I go to HD TV Torrents as a Peer they really FLY even with a Seed to Peer ratio of perhaps 1 to 3 I can still max out my 100 megabit download speed, but with Karaoke torrents when I had the seed box with a 200 megabit upload capacity, very few peers took more than 200 to 600 Kilobits per second. I have tried educating the downloaders but few, if any read the text which goes with the download as they just press the download button direct from the search screen and never see that bit. I would like to think there is an other reason for these very slow downloading peers, other than simple bad practise. Some are taking over 5 hours to download a 1GB file.
And most of these are in Europe, countries with a good internet backbone. What are they doing??? downloading 40 torrents at the same time [Image: exclamation.gif] Is there anything I can do to help them???
10-21-2015, 12:00 AM (This post was last modified: 10-21-2015, 12:08 AM by GaryE.
Edit Reason: forgot to talk about your screenshot LOL
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There are still lots of people with ADSL who do try to download too many torrents at once. It happens a lot. Yeah it does not make sense but people do it! Just yesterday I noticed someone downloading a torrent that was in the 35 GB + range where I was the only peer and that person was downloading from me at less than 50 kbit/sec. Seriously! LOL I have 75 Mbit/sec upload and at that time I was currently uploading at a total of maybe 20 - 25 Mbit/sec so I had lots more speed to give. What I am trying to say is that many times the issue is just slow peers. (I just double checked and that person is still downloading . . . at 12 kbit/sec LOL)
Sometimes when I have uploaded stuff I will get a 30 GB torrent out to say 7 peers in the matter of 6 hours. I upload the exact same torrent to another site and it takes 2 days to send the torrent out to 7 peers.
Who knows?
Without being able to see both ends of the link it is always going to be a guessing game as to what is going on.
Also I personally do not recommend super-seeding. I have done a lot of experimenting with it over the years and I have found that if your upload speed is over roughly 4 Mbit/sec super-seeding is if anything slower than regular seeding.
Super-seeding was developed primarily to help low bandwidth users to seed out largish torrents more quickly. In my experiments a super-seeded torrent in that low bandwidth area of under 2 or 3 Mbit/sec when uploading a torrent over 4 GB only got the data out to 5 or more peers about 20% faster than regular seeding. So even when using it as intended it does not make that big of a difference.
Again without being able to control both ends of the link and test in a completely controlled environment (which I did/do not have the resources to do) it is hard to say for dead certain . . . but most of the intelligent discussion I have read regarding super-seeding falls into that kind of area that I described. It is ok if you have slower speeds and you are uploading larger files but if you have even moderate speed it makes little to no difference and in some cases it takes longer.
The problem comes when there are only a few peers on the torrent. If some of those initial peers have poor upload speed when you are initially sending out each block/piece once (until all pieces are sent) the whole swarm is kind of screwed because those pieces will not get offered again at anything approaching reasonable speed until you have sent every piece once.
Of course if you have fairly fast speed you get those pieces sent out faster than those initial slow seeders.
So super-seeding only works well when those first few seeders are very fast uploaders. If they are slow . . . then the whole process does not work well.
There are so many variables that I could go on and on and on and on but the bottom line is that unless you are sending out say roughly 40 GB torrents with a 8 Mbit/sec connection I would not even consider super-seeding. Honestly, I would not recommend it at all with 8 Mbit/sec upload speed but your chances of it being faster are far better with very large torrents when your upload speed is that fast. I personally stopped using super-seeding (other than for experimental purposes) about 6 years ago when I got upgraded from 2 Mbit/sec to 10 Mbit/sec.
But use it if you want just be aware that it does not guarantee that you will get the data out faster than just doing regular seeding.
Ok back on track. Looking at your screenshot. What I suspect you are seeing is simply that the fast uploader(s) only have 42% of the torrent. The folks who have more than that were likely the first few on the torrent and were downloading greedily but had poor upload speed so the unique pieces they got they have been very very slow to send out to other peers.
It looks like a classic case of what I was talking about when I was describing the problems with super-seeding. I have seen that happen a lot on torrents which were super-seeded. It is unfortunate but the only thing you can do to combat that problem is to not use super-seeding.
Well thank you for that Gary, That does put my mind at ease somewhat. I agree after the last few days testing that with an upload speed of 8 megabits per second not using super seeding is a good idea. And yes the peers at the top of the download chart there were the early birds who grabbed up the download at my maxium seeding rate before the majority of the slower peers joined the party. DSL is a problem. Where I live it is hopeless, Upload speed of 1.5 mbps and download of just 15 are seldom met due to the age of the telephone network here which dates back to the 2nd World War. I am on fibre optic cable but even then when there is a big sporting match on things get difficult as the Islands Bandwidth reaches saturation point and ISP's have to start throttling back upload speeds.
However this latest one is flying out the door so, I will leave it at that and thank everyone on this thread for your valuable insight and help. Cheers.
