TekSavvy → [DSL] P2P Connectivity

Over the past few years I've been having more and more issues with P2P connectivity. I'm sure this is partly due to certain ISPs and partly due to increased traffic on the system. Is there anything that the user or TSI can do to improve the ability to connect to others?

As an example, today I'm set on 6.7Mbit settings (max possible is 9.7Mbit), wired, no other systems online. 6ms ping, full speed for my profile, only 1 torrent active (all others stopped). Everything should be grand but a 1.6gb download is now in its 7th hour despite being among the first ~40 to start downloading it. That wouldn't be so bad except that 300+ others started & completed since, in the entire time I've never been able to connect to any seeds, and of the 8000+ in the swarm I'm only able to connect to about 50-60 of them (only a handful of which I can leech from).

I've noticed in the stats in uTorrent my share ratios go down as the completion date gets older. I'm not sure how to fix what's going on, especially since once I connect speeds are fine.

Almost sounds like your utorrent settings are messed up.

i would uninstall utorrent and delete any and all settings. Restart the computer. Then download the latest version of utorrent and try again since all the settings will be set to default. Does not seem like its an internet connection.

Your not running tomato firmware on your router by chance are you?

Nope, not running a separate router.

I'm thinking I might try a different P2P client if I can find a good one. I haven't been happy with utorrent for a while so it gives me an excuse to try some. That's the one thing I miss about OSX - Transmission - it is the lightweight client utorrent used to be.

Try maybe an older version of utorrent, maybe one from before version 2.0.

I suggest qBittorrent. Super light, super neat, nice web server and a nice feature to remove a torrent from list once a desired share ratio is achieved.

And no pesky Bloatware !!!

I recommend utorrent 2.2.1

It's the last good one without any bloatware in it.

There are technical reasons why I wouldn't want to downgrade. That said, I've switched to QBT and am pretty happy with it. It's ugly as sin and missing some options but it works. Interestingly, I deleted utorrent and its appdata folder, re-installed, just to see if it was a bad config - it wasn't. Same connectivity issues, downloading the exact same torrent in QBT maxes out the possible connections and almost entirely on seeders.

Very weird, i guess utorrent does not like you

Well at least you found a way to get it to work. You could always compare the settings between the two clients maybe something is set incorrectly on utorrent.

Check out this thread: »Torrents & IP location

Sound familiar? "My torrents suck. TSI do something. Oh, my _torrent client is a steaming heap of elephant dung. I had no idea."

Use Emule?...

When I was P2Ping that's all I used.

as long as you have some files to share it does not work too badly. (And upload at about 12-16KBytes a second..)

eMule... I used that for years - in large part because some of the downloads I wanted were actually taking that long to actually complete and I could not find them anywhere else.

I used to have my own modded client back then to bypass speed ratio restrictions so I could get the maximum possible download since it was often days if not weeks between times where my downloads had sources and I did not want my 6GB Videotron cap to get wasted on upload with nothing in return.

I wanted to say thanks for the suggestion. I tried it out for a week but ultimately found it wasn't getting the job done.

Issues I found:
- Torrents would become stalled with no explanation
- Seeding often didn't occur once completed (despite thousands of leechers)
- It handled running out of HDD space very very poorly. Aside from having a notification conniption fit, it didn't recover gracefully. Even after fixing the space issue, forcing a recheck, etc the torrents will not resume.
- Updating trackers become stuck resulting in uploading/downloading being extremely slow until a manual "force update" was done.

Onwards to Taxiti!