Download throttling and reseeding?

[MyonMyon]

Hi everyone,

First, I'd like to say that I have read the Wiki and FAQ BUT I didn't understand all of it. So that's why I'm here with two questions. I also read the first 5 pages of this forum but didn't find an answer. Oh, and i'm new to torrents.

My story in short:

1. Found out there's this thing called anime and it's fun to watch 
2. Installed UTorrent and downloaded a few series
3. Made an account here because they had some stuff which had no seeds on other trackers
4. At 15GB down, 0 up, found out there's this ratio thingy 
5. Now trying to seed some files

So here's the beef. I'll start with download throttling. I read in the wiki that throttling your download is a way to keep your ratio better. Because it will seed the parts you have ready while downloading the rest. Well, sounds about right. BUT during the 15 GB of downloads here, my upload meter stayed put at 0.00KB. So it wasn't seeding anything while I downloaded. Every single file in my profile showed: uploaded 0, downloaded X. So how would slowing down my download help me seed more WHILE downloading if it doesn't seed anything while downloading anyway? As a note, my client shows I've uploaded a total of 2GB (remember, it's not all from downloads from this site but i think about 1/4 of my files are from BakaBT) but my profile here still showed 0.00KB. So what's the deal? I figured that either

a. It's not seeding anything while downloading and the number on my client is related to something else
b. It's seeding while downloading but the site does not recognize it
c. It's seeding something while downloading but the amount is neglectably small and thus doesn't count (see my screenshot here where the code geass torrent has seeded a grand total of 176KB during the 16GB i've downloaded)

So my question is: is it supposed to be like this or is something preventing me from seeding while the file is incomplete and being downloaded?


Then my second question: reseeding files downloaded from elsewhere. I read the Wiki article, did everything as it said. I removed the old torrent, downloaded a new from BakaBT, pointed it to the folder, forced the re-check. Everything went fine and the files started seeding... or did they? They show up as seeding, they can be seen in my bakabt profile with downloaded 0 (naturally as i downloaded them from another site) BUT also uploaded 0. Even though utorrent says they are seeding, every one of them has uploaded exactly 0.00KB. You can see these 3 files in the screenshot i have highlighted. They are the ones I downloaded elsewhere. As i redownloaded the .torrent from here, all of them have only the bakabt tracker which is working according to utorrent.

Now, I know what you think: "the seed/peer ratio is over 10, you won't seed fast anyway". Yes, it is. But that does not mean that in 5 hours it wouldn't seed ANYTHING. If it was working it should at least seed something in this time. If you look at the other files seeding (those are downloaded from BakaBT) you can see that their seed/peer ratio is also high but they have seeded at least a few MB. The only ones not managing to seed anything are the ones I'm trying to reseed.

I just find it very unlikely that with a total of 20 peers, these 3 would seed absolutely nothing while the ones i got from here would seed at least something with similar seed/peer ratios. What could be wrong here? If the files weren't right, it wouldn't pass the re-check with the redownloaded torrent from BakaBT.


Thanks for your help in advance!

[Al_Sleeper]

Are you sure your router was set up properly?

[MyonMyon]

After posting I read a bit more from the utorrent site and they recommended setting up a static IP and using port forwarding.

I followed the guides there and set my IP as static and opened the utorrent incoming connections port from my router manually. Portforward.com tells me that the port my utorrent uses is now open. And actually one of those three reseeded files started seeding. So I guess the problem was router-dependent.


However, the file i'm downloading still seeds nothing even though i have 17 GB downloaded, 9 files at 100% finished and the download speed throttled. Any ideas why it wouldn't seed while i'm leeching? (the problem is still the same as in first post)

[Al_Sleeper]

Which version of uTorrent are you using? I still use uTorrent v.1.8.5 on my old system because I encountered throttling problems in several versions of v.2.x.

[MyonMyon]

I'm currently on utorrent 3.2.1.

If I switch to an older version, will it affect my download/upload statistics? I guess I'd have to redownload the torrents so would it wipe the stats?

[Al_Sleeper]

IIRC, no.

[MyonMyon]

I guess I'll try using utorrent 1.8.5. I'll set it up tomorrow and see if it changes anything. Thanks for your help mate 

[Al_Sleeper]

To be on the safe side, make backup copies of both uTorrent folders, from /Program Files/ and from /Application Data/, before installing it on your system.

[megido-rev.M]

%User%\AppData\Roaming for Win7 I believe.
Possibly something blocking BT upstreams on the network itself, as I've not seen something like this otherwise.

[Freedom Kira]

Since your client combines all your stats, it's quite possible that none of the 2GB you have recorded is from BakaBT.

Set up a temporary second client and your BakaBT torrents in that client. See if anything changes.

BTW, you normally don't need to forward ports when you're torrenting. If you can seed and leech fine, which is evident, don't worry about that.

Also, I see upload statistics recorded for you. Perhaps you were just a little impatient. For the record, the site's statistics are a little behind, by up to around 15 minutes. The page also does not update in real-time; you have to manually reload the page.

[brunoais]

%User%\AppData\Roaming for Win7 I believe.

Actually it's
%appdata%\utorrent
for windows, from windows XP (dunno about the previous ones)
the "user" enviornment variable does not exist. It's %userprofile% and... Don't trust that appdata is in that place.

[Bob2004]

%User%\AppData\Roaming for Win7 I believe.

Actually it's
%appdata%\utorrent
for windows, from windows XP (dunno about the previous ones)
the "user" enviornment variable does not exist. It's %userprofile% and... Don't trust that appdata is in that place.

In XP, yes. In Vista and 7, it's C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\utorrent, as he said.

[MyonMyon]

Since your client combines all your stats, it's quite possible that none of the 2GB you have recorded is from BakaBT.

Set up a temporary second client and your BakaBT torrents in that client. See if anything changes.

BTW, you normally don't need to forward ports when you're torrenting. If you can seed and leech fine, which is evident, don't worry about that.

Also, I see upload statistics recorded for you. Perhaps you were just a little impatient. For the record, the site's statistics are a little behind, by up to around 15 minutes. The page also does not update in real-time; you have to manually reload the page.

I was not sure about the port forwarding thing, but the utorrent site recommended it and after I did it, all of my torrents started seeding properly. Might have been just a coincidence but at least its working now. I've managed to buff my ratio to 0,3 this far. Is that enough to avoid being warned? I don't really have the opportunity to have my PC seeding 24/7.

Also, I'm running windows 8 consumer preview so i found the files at %appdata%. Testing the download throttling thing today, this time with more simultanious slow downloads.

[Al_Sleeper]

IIRC, warning threshold is ~0.1.

[MyonMyon]

Interestingly enough, after switching to utorrent 1.8.5 my seeding speed increased dramatically.

With 3.2.1 the average speed of total upload on the 7 torrents during 20 hours was 55KB/s. The number was very fluctuating, bouncing anywhere between 0 and 150KB/s, mostly being between 20 and 70 KB/s. It would make spikes between 0 and 100KB/s in a pretty much symmetrical way.

With 1.8.5, with the same torrents, amount of seeds/peers hasn't changed: average of 190KB/s. My network max upload speed is about 200KB/s. Throughout the last 2 hours the upload speed has been steadily between 150KB/s and 220 KB/s, never dropping below.

Coincidence? Maybe. I noticed each of my torrents is now connected to a larger number of peers, thus keeping the upstream steady. Might be courtesy of the torrent program, or just luck. There aren't more leechers than yesterday so it can't be a suddenly increased demand. And even that wouldn't probably increase the up speed threefold.

Or then my ISP just had a problem yesterday... dunno.


Anyways, thanks for everyone who replied to this topic. On my behalf, we can let this topic drop unless someone has more relevant information.

[Freedom Kira]

No, it's not a coincidence - people often report that kind of increase after downgrading to 1.8.5.

I'm pretty sure that if you disable uTP in 3.x you should see better performance.

[megido-rev.M]

Yep, definitely disable uTP.

[brunoais]

%User%\AppData\Roaming for Win7 I believe.

Actually it's
%appdata%\utorrent
for windows, from windows XP (dunno about the previous ones)
the "user" enviornment variable does not exist. It's %userprofile% and... Don't trust that appdata is in that place.

In XP, yes. In Vista and 7, it's C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\utorrent, as he said.

Wrong.
There's no guarantee that the var %appdata% is:
C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming
It can be:
D:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming
Like it is in my system.
FYI, the directory "C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming" does not exist on my computer .
If you still think I'm wrong PM me with something that clearly proves I'm wrong (I'll fix these 2 posts if I'm wrong). Else, don't start an argument and accept what I state.

[Bob2004]

%User%\AppData\Roaming for Win7 I believe.

Actually it's
%appdata%\utorrent
for windows, from windows XP (dunno about the previous ones)
the "user" enviornment variable does not exist. It's %userprofile% and... Don't trust that appdata is in that place.

In XP, yes. In Vista and 7, it's C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\utorrent, as he said.

Wrong.
There's no guarantee that the var %appdata% is:
C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming
It can be:
D:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming
Like it is in my system.
FYI, the directory "C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming" does not exist on my computer .
If you still think I'm wrong PM me with something that clearly proves I'm wrong (I'll fix these 2 posts if I'm wrong). Else, don't start an argument and accept what I state.

Well, I was working under the assumption that 95% of people have their user directories in the default location, and those few who don't probably know where it is already without us having to tell them

[megido-rev.M]

Let's just agree that it's in the relevant user's AppData\Roaming (forget the environment variables) .