I'm starting to explore torrents, any tips ?

[Spiug31]

I've just had my first look at Mininova, found several interesting audio files (recorded from radio broadcasts) and am downloading them with

[Spiug31]

p.s.

What level of seeds to peers is most conducive to speedy downloads (is it simply more seeds and less peers or is a mixture going to perform better)?

I seem to be picking up more seeds/peers on the torrents I'm downloading, the longer the torrent progresses. Is this solely due to entering a more popular time of day/night or is there something else occuring ?

[deepak]

There are a lot of factors that dictate torrent download speed. Like on a public tracker you could have a 10:1 seed:leech ratio and only be getting 100 k/s because the seeders are all uploading at a very low rate. Then you could go on a private tracker and the S:L ratio is 10:5 and be getting 1 MB/s because the majority of seeders are seeding from 100 mbit servers.

I seem to be picking up more seeds/peers on the torrents I'm downloading, the longer the torrent progresses. Is this solely due to entering a more popular time of day/night or is there something else occuring ?

This is because your client is slowly connecting to more seeders. I don't know about utorrent but in Azureus you can see the number of seeds you are connected to.

What time of day have you found best for download, are there any tips/tricks/alternatives that might improve performance ?

This will depend on your ISP and if they throttle torrent data at "peak hours" to free up their network. Otherwise for most of the good ISPs it won't matter. I generally get the best speeds at night because I'm guessing most of the seeders increase their upload speed since they won't be using their connection.

This is very important: to get the fastest speeds you want to make yourself connectible. This means opening up ports for Bit Torrent in your router. Here is a good website to help with that: http://portforward.com/routers.htm

[Spiug31]

Thankyou

[dc]

Yes, you NEED to open some ports for bit torrent to work to its fullest potential (if you're behind a router that is, if you're directly connected to the net then don't worry)

Due to the nature of torrents they're de-centralised, Peer-to-peer networks, so as the name suggests you discover other peers, through the peers you're already connected to.

So the tracker will get you started and everyone uses that as a single point of reference, but it doesn't store a list of people who have that file, so the best thing to do is stay connected and let it discover others.

Generally seeders are better since they have the complete file, but so long as the complete package is available out there the more people the better. Oh, also configure your torrent software to allow as many simultaneous connections as your computer/connection can handle - this will help speed things up.

The biggest PITA is when there are no seeders and everyone is missing the same section of file because it never ever got uploaded and the seeders have disappeared =(

[Spiug31]

I've set it up and doing a test download of openoffice gets me a p2p download rate equal to that of my best direct file transfer .

Transfer rate slows dramatically when I use public (non-dedicated) sources so I may look into joining a private group with seeds/peers using higher upload rates but for now I'm getting all the files I am interested in at no extra cost and in an acceptable time.

Thankyou both for the information I have found it most helpful

[laxx]

Make sure you set your upload to about 85% of your max speed. I'll post a link on how to maximize your speeds later.