Haha, yet another long post.
12/1 means 12Mbps download and 1Mbps upload; i.e. it is a measure of your connection speed, or at least what your ISP quotes you. He was probably comparing your speeds to what US ISPs usually give.
If you notice your computer slows down a lot, try uTorrent, as it is much more lightweight. The switch may cause some initial confusion, though, as the interface is pretty different. But if you are running on a slower computer, it may be a worthwhile switch for you. I'm not about to tell you that one is better than the other, as they have their pros and cons.
As for speeds, it seems that calculator tells you to limit it to 80% of your limit. But yeah, if you are fine with other Internet-using activities at 80%, you might as well leave it at 80%.
Ah, Alaska. The yellow pyramid is the server that the site recommends to you based on your location, which in turn is determined by your IP, so it's not always accurate but it tries to pick the server that is nearest your location. When you tested with Whitehorse you may have run into some server overload problems on their side. I just tested with Whitehorse myself, and the speeds are more or less as expected. According to your speeds, you seem to have a 12.5/1 connection given overhead.
You don't seem to have a clear understanding of how it works. When you run a test, regardless of your location, you are testing your own connection, not the connection of the area that you choose. The pyramids that show up are the available servers you can choose from to conduct your test (you need someone to upload/download the test data to/from). Sometimes servers may become overloaded so it's a good idea to try a few different locations until you seem to have consistent results.
In other words, you can't run a speedtest to a server in SanFran and assume the speed you get from that will be the speed you will get from your ISP there.
As for discrepancies in the download speed, it interests me as I don't usually see such large differences. You might just have picked overloaded servers (which would not be able to push out data as quickly as they normally would) by coincidence.
And as for ISP average, this is a comparison of your speed to an average of the results obtained from your ISP. Seems like they take the speeds that fall in the 95th percentile and average them, and compare your results to this average. Read more at
Speedtest's Q&A. It will answer your question about location as well.
0.01Mbps is approximately equal to 10Kbps, which is 1.25KBps. It's negligible. The test is rarely, if ever, 100% accurate anyway.
Speedtest should be giving you your speed in Megabits. Your 12.something should be in Mbps. Most clients, Vuze and uTorrent included (though you can change uTorrent's setting to display in bits instead), display your speed in Bytes.
On conversions, there are 8 bits in a Byte, yeah? Hope you knew that. Anyway that's what you use to convert - multiply or divide by 8.
Also, to be exact, a Megabyte is supposed to be 1024 kilobytes. Conventions have changed, though, such that a Megabyte is 1000 kiloBytes, while a Mebibyte is 1024 Kibibytes. It's stupid - in the computing world most people still use 1024 for Megabytes.
Nah, newy wasn't making fun of you. He just answers the "OMG HOW DO I SEED MOAR QUICKLY" question every other day, so he finds a new way to explain so it doesn't get boring. That's how I see it anyway. Don't kill me, newy.
Anyway, that's the jist of it. You can only seed to people who are downloading the data. You don't throw a football where there's no one to catch it.
And yes, everything is relative, which is what your ratio measures. So yeah, if you somehow manage to download 500TB, only uploading 100TB (i.e. 0.2 ratio) isn't really being fair.
To be crystal clear, individual ratios don't matter in the end either, it's your single global one (total up divided by total down) that does.
Oh, we have trolls here too. The n00b-pwners seem to be on holiday though. Well, one of the two, anyway. But yeah, people around here are more helpful and friendly to people who are willing to look up information for themselves before asking questions. We usually just get annoyed at people who just walk in here and ask the same generic question that has been answered in the Wiki, aside from hundreds of times in the forums. If you lurk around the help forum, you'll soon see what I mean.
