I'm a bit unclear on how KTorrent deals with partial downloads. I have a huge torrent - hundreds of files, +10GB - of which I'm only interested in a handful. When I try to download only those few of them, however, I get some strange behavior - ktorrent says, first, that there are 45+ days left before the download completes - inconsistent with the observed rate and size of the download. Also, it lists a %complete for files it isn't even downloading. The only disk images are for the files I want, but I'm worried that ktorrent is wasting time on chunks I'm not interested in. Is this possible? How does ktorrent deal with this?

As far as I know, things got a bit broken in 2.2. 2.2.1 should be released soon, fixing those issues.

I've observed this too. It would seem that Ktorrent 'downloads' the file structure for the entire torrent and sometimes even parts (file names and beginnings) of some of the files which I have not checked for download.

All that, at the very least, makes figuring out what has really been completely downloaded confusing. I look forward to that being fixed!

gary_lankford wrote:I've observed this too. It would seem that Ktorrent 'downloads' the file structure for the entire torrent and sometimes even parts (file names and beginnings) of some of the files which I have not checked for download.

It does not download. Those not downloaded files are sparse files and they don't take any disk space. What's more, some chunks span over file boundaries so in order to get the end of one file, you also need to download beginning of another (i.e. full chunk).