As a torrent seeder, does one's max upload speed affect their likelihood of connecting w/ leechers? I know about port forwarding and all that jazz, but suppose a leecher adds a torrent with 10 seeders—does the leecher's client give any sort of preferential treatment for seeders w/ faster connections or is it basically each seeder has an equal (in this case, 10%) chance of being the chosen one? In other words, do seeders w/ normie home internet connections have a disadvantage over those w/ the faster connections?

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[–] BlueRingedOctopus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

Yes location and Upload Speed does come into play when a modern torrent client tries to pick which seeders to connect to. Users with very high upload speeds will obviously get more connections. This is why it's super hard for users to get Upload on private trackers like RED where a lot of users use 10-20 Gbps seedboxes. Your average 500 mbps connections has no chance against it, you'd get around 1-5% upload of the size of that torrent if you're lucky. There's also a thing where Seedboxes would pick seedboxes that are in the same data centers, racks as them and would cross-seed/leech between themselves first.

[–] unperson@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The leecher will keep trying to connect until it reaches its configured limit. So for a torrent with 10 seeders, you will certainly be connected to.

You can win over faster seeders by configuring your client to use TCP instead of UDP (µTP), and your operating system to an aggressive TCP congestion control algorithm like BBR.

If you do this you'll saturate your upload and win over every other peer using µTP or cubic/reno TCP, even if the peer is very far away.

[–] Ghostbanjo1949@lemmy.mengsk.org 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The downloader will make a connection to as many of them as possible. I believe it doesn't care about the capabilities of the seeder at all as long as it has the piece it's looking for.

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 days ago

Yes and no. Depending on your client I believe you can tweak the settings to avoid slow seeders if others are available (especially if you have a set max connections per torrent)

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

That's not quite right ! When seeding on private trackers I sometimes do not go above 120kb/s (competition against highspeed seedboxes) while on public trackers I can seed as much as 20-40mb/s.

[–] stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

No (*actually yes).

It’s your round trip ping, how quickly your seeding device responds to some leeching devices request that determines weather or not you end up sending a chunk out to them.

Of course, aside from people on satellite every high bandwidth connection (measured in millions or billions of bits transferred per second) will also have lower latency (measured in increasingly small fractions of a second).

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.org 7 points 2 days ago

I don't believe so. I'm fairly certain it'll connect to as many as your settings will allow. I connect to 40+ seeders fairly routinely.

Though there are other settings that will effect who connects to you or not. Encryption is one. Some leechers require the seeder sends an encrypted stream. Another is the port forwarding. If you don't have your port forwarding settings set up properly on your client and router then not as many will connect.

On the other hand if your home network upload is maxed out due to low cable/dsl upload speeds, that'l stop new connections too.