Hello,

I just installed OpenSuse 10.3 which included a new version of KTorrent (version 3.3.4). This also marked a transition from KDE3 to KDE4 which I had been avoiding for as long as possible. Ever since, no one has uploaded anything from my torrent collection. I can download new torrents, which end up with a status of "seeder", where all of the old torrents have a status of "Download completed". I'm not seeing any uploads for the "seeder" status files either, but the sample size is small and that just could be coincidental. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks a bunch,
-Ken

If the number of seeders is a lot larger then the number of leechers on a torrent, it might take some time before you find leechers to seed to.

Yea, but it's been almost a full day with no uploads whatsoever, and before I installed the new version there were always uploads going on.

I solved part of the mystery. If I highly all torrents and select Start from the RMB menu, the statuses all change to either 'Seeding' or 'Queued for seeding'. Selecting Stop changes all of them back to 'Download Completed' Apparently the migration from the previous version missed the fact that the torrents were all active, and migrated my 5 upload slot setting to a 5 seed limit.

Next question. Why is there a seed limit and a seed queue? It makes it sound like only torrents that are actively being seed can be found by other clients and uploaded to them, which doesn't make any sense at all. Is the seed limit actually closer to the old update limit, meaning that all torrents, even ones queued for seeding, can be found and requested by clients, but they can't actually be uploaded until there is room for them to be actively seeded?

Next I tried setting the seed limit to 'No limit' which gave every torrent a status of 'Seeding' and started lots of uploads. Too many in fact. Even though I still have a upload limit set to 5, I see over 20 uploaders trying to share a limited upload bandwidth, with the predictable result that nobody is getting very much. Is upload limit no longer working?

I guess I'll set the seed limit back to 5 until I get a better explanation of what is happening.

That's not good either, now only 5 torrents are seeding, but only two of them are actually uploading. So it does in fact look like only the seeded torrents are available and if nobody is currently uploading from them they just occupy the seed slot for probably forever. What is going on here? Is the upload limit supposed to actually limit the number of uploads that can take place at the same time. If it is, that is what I want, but it isn't working. If it isn't, is there a way to duplicate that functionality?

Thanks a bunch,
-Ken

kencorbin wrote:Yea, but it's been almost a full day with no uploads whatsoever, and before I installed the new version there were always uploads going on.

I solved part of the mystery. If I highly all torrents and select Start from the RMB menu, the statuses all change to either 'Seeding' or 'Queued for seeding'. Selecting Stop changes all of them back to 'Download Completed' Apparently the migration from the previous version missed the fact that the torrents were all active, and migrated my 5 upload slot setting to a 5 seed limit.

If they aren't running your are not going to seed anything. And the number of upload slots has nothing to do with the maximum amount of seeding torrents the queue manager will run.

Next question. Why is there a seed limit and a seed queue? It makes it sound like only torrents that are actively being seed can be found by other clients and uploaded to them, which doesn't make any sense at all. Is the seed limit actually closer to the old update limit, meaning that all torrents, even ones queued for seeding, can be found and requested by clients, but they can't actually be uploaded until there is room for them to be actively seeded?

If a torrent is in the state Downloading, Seeding or Stalled, it is running and other peers can connect to you and download from you. Any other state means the torrent isn't running.

Next I tried setting the seed limit to 'No limit' which gave every torrent a status of 'Seeding' and started lots of uploads. Too many in fact. Even though I still have a upload limit set to 5, I see over 20 uploaders trying to share a limited upload bandwidth, with the predictable result that nobody is getting very much. Is upload limit no longer working?

What upload limit ? If you mean upload slots, that is a setting per torrent, which limits the number of peers you can upload to simultaneously for each torrent.

OK, I figured out the upload slots, set it to the minimum value of 2.

The central problem remains. If it set up a restrictive seeder maximum at, say 5, the queue manager randomly picks 5 torrents and only makes those available. These torrents aren't necessarily the ones people are looking for so maybe 1 or 2 will actually be uploaded. If anyone is looking for anything else in my extensive torrent collection, they are out of luck.

Or, I set the seed maximum to unlimited. Now everything is available, everyone can find my torrents if they are looking for them. But there are 20-30 torrents being uploaded at any one time. They are all competing for limited upload bandwidth and each gets an upload speed of between 500 b/s and 2 KB/s. And that is probably being split between the two upload slots.

Either way, the other users are not having a happy experience uploading from me. There used to be a way to make all torrents available, but limit the total number who could upload at any one time. That way, everyone could find what they wanted. The lucky ones who got in could upload data at a pretty fair clip. The unlucky ones could wait for an upload slot to become available or could give up and go elsewhere. Why can't we do that now?

At least I'm pretty certain it used to work that way, but since I can no longer run the older version I an unable to absolutely confirm that.

Thanks for all the info,
-Ken

You can use the queue manager (tab in the bottom of the window), to change the priority of all torrents. And there is also a feature to decrease the priority of a torrent if it hasn't uploaded or downloaded for some time (the amount of time is configurable).

These features should allow you to seed the most active torrents, if nobody is interested in a torrent, it's priority will be decreased, and some other torrent will get it's chance to seed.

OK, I'll give that a try for a while. I assume the feature you are referring to is the decrease priority of torrents which are stalled for too long. Is the prioritization scheme used by the queue manager documented anywhere, or is it just initialized at random and then adjusts itself as torrent stall past the time limit? Can or should it look at things like the number of leechers looking for a particular torrent?

I still not too happy with the new seeder queue manager. I have a good sized collection of torrents, which are a mix of really popular torrents and rare, esoteric, hard to find torrents. With the queue manager, the esoteric torrents might as well not exist, which makes them even harder to find. They way I think things used to work, someone looking for a rare torrent would find it immediately, which put them into the upload queue. They then have to wait for days while the popular torrents ahead of it in the queue got processed. It took a while, but they could always get it if they waited long enough.

Thanks for everything,
-Ken