Author Topic: Maximize Upload (Read 2703 times)

jaybug · « **on:** June 26, 2010, 03:21:56 PM »

Hi! I'm new to Baka Bt. So new, I am still in the waiting days before more extensive browsing can be done.

I haven't been able to figure out uTorrent very effectively so far. It has been hit or miss, and none of my tweaking seems to be much help.

I have read a lot about seeders and leechers, and see how that goes, but I also wonder how at times my seed rate can be less than 1kbps, and other times hovering between 70-90kbps, for the same torrent.

It does seem that the most I can get out of my client is that 70-90 range. Even though my Internet service can upload at far greater speeds, just not as a torrent.

I though I'd ask here, as when I ask questions in the utorrent forum, the answers are far above my head. SO I am hoping that simple otakus can make things a bit clearer for me. That is if anything can be done really.

K7IA · « **Reply #1 on:** June 26, 2010, 07:04:13 PM »

jaybug, your questions might have been addressed in the wiki or previous threads before. Search for similar problems posted by members, you can find the answer there.

jaybug · « **Reply #2 on:** June 26, 2010, 08:03:47 PM »

Did that.

BuriaL · « **Reply #3 on:** June 26, 2010, 09:55:01 PM »

You should figure out what speed youre connection is first.

Then:
- Get a firewall.
- Open the ports.
- Set up utorrent to fit youre connection.
- Develop patience when uploading.

Theres some thread about it in this forum. Shouldnt be hard to find.

jaybug · « **Reply #4 on:** June 26, 2010, 10:29:55 PM »

I didn't say I couldn't upload. I just wonder how to do better than I am currently. Like those who upload to me at over 130kbps, which seems to be about the best I can remember seeing.

I'm sure things would be much faster if my ISP actually gave me the level of service I pay for. But I'm stuck at where I am at, because the next level down is less than I am now able. I pay for 10Mbps, get around 3Mbps on speed test, and the next down is 1.5Mbps.

Also, sometimes, and I guess it just depends on who else is seeding at the time, I can upload at 70-90 kbps from one specific torrent to one leecher, and sometimes even to that same leecher I can't give more than 1kbps.

I was just hoping it was more than hit or miss as far as number of connections, upload slots, etc. And keep throwing numbers at it, until you don't get any better.

Freedom Kira · « **Reply #5 on:** June 26, 2010, 10:39:12 PM »

It may have to do with the notify mechanism.

When you are downloading something, your computer has to continually send a response to the seeder, which is why you are always downloading some amount of data even when you are only seeding torrents. It's kind of like a "got it!" message that you have to send back for every fully downloaded piece of data.

If there is someone downloading from you at 70-90 kBps, if this person does not send the response quickly enough, you will seed one piece of data at 70-90 kBps, and then seed at 1 kBps to other people while you wait for the response.

This is why people recommend you keep your max upload speed limited to about 80% of your theoretical upload speed that the ISP tells you. Doing this will let your torrents run more smoothly, as the "got it!" messages can use the remaining 20%. Note that in this case it would be the downloader that does not have the right settings.

There's no guarantee that this is the cause, but it's a possibility.

Another possibility is that you are seeding to one person at the high speed, and then he closes his client after a while and you're left with no one to seed to except the slow ones. If your speed fluctuates rapidly, like at least once every two minutes, the response mechanism is more likely the problem. If it fluctuates slowly, like maybe once every hour or two, then the disappearing downloader is more likely the problem.

If it doesn't fluctuate very frequently, like if you notice the change only once or twice a week, it's probably just a lack of leechers.

Either way, you can't do anything about it.

Anyway, be sure to do what BuriaL said too. At least make sure things are fine on your side.

Quote from: jaybug on June 26, 2010, 10:29:55 PM

I didn't say I couldn't upload. I just wonder how to do better than I am currently. Like those who upload to me at over 130kbps, which seems to be about the best I can remember seeing.

Most people don't upload at 130 kBps. When you download at a high speed, it is the result of the combination of connections to several seeders that are uploading at lower speeds. That's how torrents work. Seeding works the same way - your upload speed depends on how many leechers you are able to connect to and push data at all at once.

(Edit: BTW, make sure you know the difference between b and B)

jaybug · « **Reply #6 on:** June 27, 2010, 06:26:03 AM »

No, most of the people I download from do not upload at 130kbps. But I sure treasure them when I get one! lol

About the fluctuations, it's almost like a heartbeat. And it goes into defibrilation when I am downloading. At least on some torrents. Som recent and highly popular ones are just 400-500kbps and are done in 20 minutes. They may have two of those near hundred kbps seeders there. I guess that those may be the upload servers.

For the past 15 minutes, the new day started, and my client re-news its stats. I have uploaded nearly 63MB, and downloaded nearly 4MB, of which it is all overhead; I am not downloading any torrents right now. And over the past seven hours, I have maintained about 87kbps plus overhead.

I not that when I limit the number of torrents to say four, that usually I can upload at about that 87 level to one torrent. Sometimes I can't. And from reading here, I suppose that means the leecher has found some other seeder, and so my torrent is not needed as much.

I guess I worry as many of the torrents I am seeding took me close to a week to download. They're in the multi-GB range. So I want to upload as best I can.

So I guess my problem now is which of my torrents do I really want to be sure to share the love. Or do some of you try to upload hundreds of torrents, or pause most, or... dunno?

Or should I turn this topic into a what is your upload style, what is working for you?

Freedom Kira · « **Reply #7 on:** June 27, 2010, 07:27:18 AM »

Quote from: jaybug on June 27, 2010, 06:26:03 AM

No, most of the people I download from do not upload at 130kbps. But I sure treasure them when I get one! lol

About the fluctuations, it's almost like a heartbeat. And it goes into defibrilation when I am downloading. At least on some torrents. Som recent and highly popular ones are just 400-500kbps and are done in 20 minutes. They may have two of those near hundred kbps seeders there. I guess that those may be the upload servers.

For the past 15 minutes, the new day started, and my client re-news its stats. I have uploaded nearly 63MB, and downloaded nearly 4MB, of which it is all overhead; I am not downloading any torrents right now. And over the past seven hours, I have maintained about 87kbps plus overhead.

I not that when I limit the number of torrents to say four, that usually I can upload at about that 87 level to one torrent. Sometimes I can't. And from reading here, I suppose that means the leecher has found some other seeder, and so my torrent is not needed as much.

I guess I worry as many of the torrents I am seeding took me close to a week to download. They're in the multi-GB range. So I want to upload as best I can.

So I guess my problem now is which of my torrents do I really want to be sure to share the love. Or do some of you try to upload hundreds of torrents, or pause most, or... dunno?

Or should I turn this topic into a what is your upload style, what is working for you?

In that case, it's very possible that the downloader can't respond fast enough to keep a steady high speed.

Yes, people do use seedboxes (or, as you coined it, "upload servers"), which are more popular on private trackers like BBT. Technically it's not 100% private but that's a different topic.

Hmm, what is your max number of connections uTorrent? Try setting it higher and see what happens.

And about sharing the love, pick the ones that has the least number of seeders per leecher. It's common sense if you think about it. Don't just pick the one with the most leechers. Remember it's your global ratio that counts, not individual ratios. So if you've uploaded 50 GB on a 10 GB torrent, and then upload 10 GB on a 20GB torrent, your ratio is 2.0 assuming you downloaded exactly one copy. It doesn't matter that the ratio on the second torrent is 0.5.

As for upload style, of course it varies by person. In my case, I have a separate computer that is like a server, which does all my torrenting and runs 24/7 aside from occasional reboots when it starts to slow down and hardware maintenance (dusting, etc.). On that, I have two clients running at once. One runs mostly anime and music torrents, and the other is for other small things, not BBT related. The anime/music one I limit to 27 kBps upload, and the other one 10 kBps (my upload limit is 0.5Mbps, yes it's sucky). Anime/music client currently runs 96 BBT torrents all at once (all seeding), though of course only a handful of them are uploading any data at any one time. I typically don't pause any torrents as I only check up on it once every couple days or less.

jaybug · « **Reply #8 on:** June 27, 2010, 01:38:05 PM »

It would be nice if utorrent would let one copy and paste information. But...

Connections:
Global Max. 2000
Max. # peers per 100
Upload slots per 200

I made these changes yesterday, in the midst of my forum posting some time. My rate has seemed to steady out.

Funny, the highest seeds/peers ration torrent I have is the one from BBT. Lucky 13. Two torrents are infinite, as thou shalt not divide by zero.

The torrents here need to be paused when my wife wants to check her email, or surf/shop. She isn't too quick to resume them, as she really doesn't care. sigh

0.5Mb, and you call it sucky? Phhbbbt! I should be so lucky. I get 0.3 on a good day, and torrents paused. on speed test. Still I wish I could get closer to 0.3 from 0.08.

So what sort of upload rates are you seeing roughly, of an individual torrent of your 96? Of my 21 I range between ( and this is only of those which are actively uploading only, why count zero?) is around 1 on the low side to between 10-20Kbps on the high side. Note, I just realized that utorrent is using kB/s not kb/s.

Xiong Chiamiov · « **Reply #9 on:** June 27, 2010, 05:29:04 PM »

Your upload speed will fluctuate because it's based on demand. You can't upload if no one wants it, and you can't upload faster than someone can download.

I personally use the results from this calculator to determine my settings, then tweak them as I see how it does. I would recommend choosing settings that allow you to perform basic internet-utilizing tasks while the torrents are still running, as then you don't have to bother pausing and unpausing them.

jaybug · « **Reply #10 on:** June 27, 2010, 07:12:23 PM »

Mm, thanks. I was kind of close to those numbers through trial and error. Now to just give it some time and see how it does.

Freedom Kira · « **Reply #11 on:** June 28, 2010, 07:15:49 AM »

Quote from: jaybug on June 27, 2010, 01:38:05 PM

It would be nice if utorrent would let one copy and paste information. But...

Connections:
   Global Max. 2000
   Max. # peers per 100
   Upload slots per 200

I made these changes yesterday, in the midst of my forum posting some time. My rate has seemed to steady out.

Funny, the highest seeds/peers ration torrent I have is the one from BBT. Lucky 13. Two torrents are infinite, as thou shalt not divide by zero.

The torrents here need to be paused when my wife wants to check her email, or surf/shop. She isn't too quick to resume them, as she really doesn't care. sigh

0.5Mb, and you call it sucky? Phhbbbt! I should be so lucky. I get 0.3 on a good day, and torrents paused. on speed test. Still I wish I could get closer to 0.3 from 0.08.

So what sort of upload rates are you seeing roughly, of an individual torrent of your 96? Of my 21 I range between ( and this is only of those which are actively uploading only, why count zero?) is around 1 on the low side to between 10-20Kbps on the high side. Note, I just realized that utorrent is using kB/s not kb/s.

0.5Mbps is a max of 64 kBps. Crap, I used the wrong letter. My bad. I'd love to have a 0.5MBps connection.
When you said you uploaded at around 87-90 kbps I assumed you meant kBps, as most clients use B instead of b (unless you change this in the settings or something if it is available, which I believe it is in uTorrent) and it would be pointless to do the conversion from B to b.

Either way, though, here in North America our connections are dwarfed by connections in, for example, Japan and Europe. At least our connections are usually better than in, say, Australia.

You should limit your up speed to about 60-70% of your ISP's quoted up speed if you want to use the Internet for other things while you torrent. Mind you, if you game online, you'd probably wanna just pause everything. Otherwise, 60% or so is pretty decent.
Eh, guess Foxkeh got that before I did.

Those numbers look pretty good for your speed.

As for upload rates, the highest I see is around 5 or so kBps at any one time.
When I download anime from other sources and seed them (I always seed back public torrents to at least 0.5), they usually suck up all the upload bandwidth, and so my BBT torrents slow to around 1-2kBps max... most of them are a fraction of 1kBps when it gets heavy.
It's the combined global upload that really counts, though.

jaybug · « **Reply #12 on:** June 28, 2010, 12:34:50 PM »

Well, it's been nigh unto 24 hours since I made the changes according to that calculator. Upload speed overall seems to be about the same. But somehow I don't think the Azureus calculator doesn't fir exactly for uTorrent client. I mean that I have put down 4 for the maximum number of torrents, and 10 are running now. ( Which makes me wonder if any of them which I have force started in the past, may be still in force, even after being paused.)

One torrent is trying to go at over 30, and a couple are less than 1. No, the torrent I have from BBT is not the one running at 30. And I am not going to pause all the others to see if I can get it higher. I am pretty sure it wouldn't.

Not sure if I like this setting better or not. I was hoping that 4 meant 4, but...

K7IA · « **Reply #13 on:** June 28, 2010, 01:16:28 PM »

^ did you try prioritizing BBT torrents through higher bandwidth allocation.

BuriaL · « **Reply #14 on:** June 28, 2010, 01:48:07 PM »

Sorry Xiong..i dont like that calculator. The reason is:
It might be a simple calculation in theory. Thats just what it is, theory.
This calculator dont account for the traffic. Like if youre connected to me, utorrent sends requests, maybe looses some stuff on the way, lags.. And if the torrent is made up of 256kB pices..more traffic.

The calculator says 288 connections / torrent, and 1200 global..
I dont get why i would want to choke the connection to "snail mode" to have ALOT more connections than i need.

I have 400 global, and for downloading 1 torrent from BBT i need maximum 10 of those.
I never set more than 200 connections for one torrent. And i reserve 100-200kB(for the traffic, not the DL) for those so i dont choke.

K7IA · « **Reply #15 on:** June 28, 2010, 08:09:36 PM »

@jaybug: Are you using windows XP?

If you are, there is a limitation on number of half-open connections that an application can have on this operation system after SP2. By default uTorrent is configured to abide this limit (in the advanced settings-> net.max_halfopen =

and it shouldn't be a problem.

The news is, I am seeing several warnings in my Event Viewer->System logs (in Computer Management) saying that I have exceeded this limit imposed by the operating system and can not upload beyond %30 of my capacity. When this limit is exceeded, the operating system automatically prevents the application (in this case uTorrent) from creating new connections to the peers for a period of time (hours?) and as a result you can not utilize your bandwidth.

If you are using XP and there are TCPIP warnings as a source in your Event Viewer->System logs having the message "TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.", this might be your problem.

(click to show/hide)

BuriaL · « **Reply #16 on:** June 28, 2010, 08:38:35 PM »

Iam using XP SP2 and i dont have this problem. Maybe i dont have a standard windows, or i got some software that overrides it, dunno.

I do remember this from from somewhere tho.
If its a problem..Here

Xiong Chiamiov · « **Reply #17 on:** June 29, 2010, 01:26:07 AM »

Quote from: BuriaL on June 28, 2010, 01:48:07 PM

Sorry Xiong..i dont like that calculator.

I don't recommend just plugging in the values and leaving them at that, but it gives a useful place to start.

I was able to sustain many more connections than previously when I did some tweaking to my router, but that's just one example of things that change from system to system. Use your own judgement.

jaybug · « **Reply #18 on:** June 29, 2010, 01:50:54 AM »

I'm using Windows 7. I haven't seen anything untoward about any half-open stuff. Yet....

I have played around with the bandwidth allocator by right-clicking the torrent and going from there. But I can't remember if any of the ones I am currently uploading are one of them. I'm at work, and I just wanted to let you know I've seen your posts.

BY the by, I thank everyone for their input.

I've been thinking about buying a different router, and getting rid of the cheap hunk of junk the ISP provided. Thing goes out and needs re-setting. You know when as everything acts as if it's on dial-up. Happens about every other month or so. Of course they say I may have problems, and describe what another router may do, which coincide with the symptoms I have using their router. And the drawback is what, I ask.

I'm thinking about maybe limiting my uploading torrents from somewhere from two to six. Just so that one of them will be at a much higher rate than the 20-30 I have been seeing lately. Maybe all the way up to 80!

lol So does anyone know how to make utorrent only actually upload what I hit apply for, or do I have to finish uploading to all pre-existing leechers before what I have newly set will become applicable?

Just got home. And after I un-froze my computer, I noticed one of the torrent wasn't allowing DHT, and I wondered if that was something as part of these configuratoin changes I have been making since starting this thread. So I looked under and they weren't checked in the boxes. SO I looked at other torrents, and they allowed DHT.

But, going back to the Bit Torrent page in preferences, I noticed two un-checked boxes, "Limit local peer bandwidth, and Enable bandwidth management." I see those and wonder what those do, if anything good, or make a real mess of things. TO me it's like seeing the DOOR AJAR light on a car. If I didn't have my door open, I may think this opens the door automatically, or something like that. Sometimes I think I have had far too many English classes in my life. My guess is that the first one keeps a peer from getting too much, the second seems to me to be redundant, I have already limited my upload to 300. Any ideas, or go with leave well enough alone?

Xiong Chiamiov · « **Reply #19 on:** June 29, 2010, 06:38:26 AM »

Quote from: jaybug on June 29, 2010, 01:50:54 AM

Just got home. And after I un-froze my computer, I noticed one of the torrent wasn't allowing DHT, and I wondered if that was something as part of these configuratoin changes I have been making since starting this thread. So I looked under and they weren't checked in the boxes. SO I looked at other torrents, and they allowed DHT.

All of our .torrents are marked private, which means that DHT is disabled on them. This is so the tracker can get (fairly) accurate information about your upload and download statistics.