Torrents of data...or not

[triadruid]

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm taking the quasi-legal route of upgrading my tape collection to digital; downloading torrents of the songs off of the Intertubes. However either the tubes have gone a little flat, or my program is a little prickly, or some third thing I haven't thought of. So here's a post for the VURD.

Things started off well: I tore through about a dozen artists who all had complete discographies, and download speeds were roughly Absurdly Fast, in the manner of torrents over broadband. I generally share out to about 5-8x what I get and then discontinue the torrent, and I generally only run them fullspeed overnight, when my other thirds (and myself) aren't trying to use the network for anything useful.

Now, I'm not technophobic exactly, but I am definitely techno-slow sometimes; I just this morning deciphered what the point of torrent 'trackers' do. I'm not using any sort of default torrent search engine, really, just looking across the whole Intarwebz via Google most days. torrentz.com and thepiratebay seem to be laid out nicely with good results and minimal spam, but that's anecdotal at best.

So I guess my big questions are:

• is there a torrent search site that gives the best/most recent trackers?
• is there a way to see your own share ratio/'score' overall, since that obviously affects seeding privileges? (in Ktorrent, for example, the higher your share ratio the more likely it is to grant you seed privs)
• Anyone else have the experience of having several Stalled and a few 2.0/Kbps torrents cause the Blagosphere to implode on their home connection, or are we just Speshul?

::edit:: And of course, while I'm posting this, our work servers decide to choke and die... or maybe it's just Mozilla?

Comments

torrential uproar

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

I would tell you the search site I use, but the machine that does that is currently having Technical Difficulties and is unavailable. I do know that I mainly chose it for its RSS abilities, so I can have ktorrent watch a list of RSS feeds from there and auto-download what I want (mostly TV shows).

You may be able to see the ratio information you're looking for by pointing your browser to the tracker itself, but I'm not sure it'll give the info you're looking for. I'm also not sure that any overall ratio makes a difference, just per-torrent ratio.

As for your connection problems when you have lots of torrents going, the issue may be a limit in your router on the number of NAT connections. I had to crank mine up to a couple thousand so that I could actually use the net for other things.

I also think Comcast's torrent-quenching shenanigans have made for a lot more stalled-at-zero torrents than there used to be, even (or especially) for those of us not actually on Comcast.

Re: torrential uproar

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Ktorrent-specific information! I found something the other day about tweaking your router's data-handling to deprioritze torrents and boost http packets, but it was about 3 quantum leaps above my skill level. :/

Re: torrential uproar

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like your problem is more about number of connections than connection priority.

My router is a Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT firmware. The setting I changed to make my network not die when lots of torrents were active looks like this:

IP Filter Settings (adjust these for P2P)
Maximum Ports: 4096 (Default: 512, Range: 0 - 4096)
TCP Timeout (in seconds): 900 (Default: 3600, Range: 0 - 3600)
UDP Timeout (in seconds): 900 (Default: 3600, Range: 0 - 3600)

BTW, the torrent search site I use is mininova.org. (My computer is back for the moment.)

Re: torrential uproar

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, mininova loads quite good search results, but is REALLY heavy on ads and such. May have to AdBlock it...

Thanks. We've got a WRT54G as well (with the default firmware - what do you think of the DD-WRT?) and that tip may come in handy (lowering the priority of port 6881 via the router did fuck-all).

Re: torrential uproar

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Heh, I mainly see mininova through the RSS feeds, but my adblocker must be blocking the ads when I go to the website....

I definitely like DD-WRT better than the default firmware since it gives more flexibility, though I'm now considering moving to OpenWRT+X-WRT for even more flexibility.

[auraseer.livejournal.com]

Last item first:
Anyone else have the experience of having several Stalled and a few 2.0/Kbps torrents cause the Blagosphere to implode on their home connection, or are we just Speshul?
This can happen. Even if you're not filling up the available bandwidth, your client will be sending out requests to other clients and the tracker, and an arbitrary number of other clients will be trying to download from you. There can be enough activity to make your connection go wonky even though there's still bandwidth available.

I have problems with this occasionally. If I leave a few stalled torrents open on one computer, I may not be able to get online reliably with the other one. Shutting down BT makes everything happy again.

is there a way to see your own share ratio/'score' overall, since that obviously affects seeding privileges?
You don't need any special privileges to seed per se. If your client is connected and you have any parts of the file, other clients will request parts from you. And if you happen to have the whole file, they'll consider you a "seed" instead of just a "downloader" (or "leecher" or whatever their client UI says).

If you have a slow upload speed, clients will just be unlikely to request very much from you. They'll grab one part at random, realize that it took you a long time to send it, and decide to get the rest of their download from somebody faster.

Some trackers enforce share ratios to determine who's allowed to add torrents to the tracker, but that's a tracker-specific deal. I understand it's mainly used to reduce leeching from semiprivate trackers.

If you want to check your ratio of providing data to receiving, check your client's UI for Total Uploaded and Total Downloaded amounts. Some will have them listed only per torrent, perhaps only for the current session, while others will show more summarized data.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Last one first: Yeah, I try to shut down Uploads entirely when actual people are trying to use the Internet, but sometimes it'll choke and die when there's just three Downloads open, and two are stalled and the other is pulling at 0.3... I suspect this is a confluence of router overburden and Roadrunner's recent problems.

You don't need any special privileges to seed per se. If your client is connected and you have any parts of the file, other clients will request parts from you. And if you happen to have the whole file, they'll consider you a "seed" instead of just a "downloader" (or "leecher" or whatever their client UI says).
I'm not sure I explained that well. My client (Ktorrent on Linux) gives priority to granting 'upload slots' to those with a better Share Ratio; the values it gives range from -50.00 (common, for some reason, and almost never granted access) to +8 or so. I'm trying to sort out what value I have, so I can know if I need to spend a few more nights exclusively Seeding to improve my eventual download speeds...

And yeah, my client records my Total Uploaded/Downloaded, but only for the current session, unfortunately. Maybe I'll see if someone I know has a torrent I want, and get them to look at it for me... ;)

[auraseer.livejournal.com]

I don't think share ratio works the way you think it works. Sharing lots of data now will not improve your standing for download on future torrents.

Granting of "upload slots" depends on the individual client software. I'm not familiar with Ktorrent's algorithm specifically, but in general they're all variations on a theme.

All clients I know of track the u/d ratio, and connection quality, separately per client and per torrent. This is by design. If you are sharing lots of data for torrent A, but have almost nothing to offer for torrent B, then I should share freely with you on A but not quite so much for B until you have more to offer.

(Actually it has to be more complicated than this, or else new downloaders would never get any data. But this is the general idea.)

Long story short, most clients don't care how much data you gave them yesterday. They all want to know what you're doing for them now.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Well, you're almost certainly right that I don't know as much as I think I do...