The last µTorrent support post I made was quite popular. over 600 hits in one day (the usual is 20-30/day). However, life goes on and so another day, another stupid support problem, but unlike last time, this guy thinks he’s smart and knows what he’s doing. Like last time, it’s the µTorrenet support channel, and this happened December 16th (yesterday)
Hard to know where to begin really. 2700 torrents, a half-open limit set to 100,000 and ‘no problems’ – Riiiight. I think MC was the only one capable of actually typing during this, the rest of us were too busy laughing.
Quite a few of the old myths came up here. First of all, the half-open connections one. There are only very very rare instances when this has to be modified (with Vista SP2 and Windows7, there isn’t a limit anyway), and in those instances, you don’t need to do more than 50, even on a 100Mbit connection. Second is the myth about having more torrents is better. 2700 torrents uses up a lot of bandwidth just in announces, bandwidth better used elsewhere. It’s maybe 3MB just in tracker announces each time (assuming only one tracker per torrent, multiple trackers, like the 4 on every piratebay torrent multiply that accordingly). Then there is the huge number of total peer connections 2700 torrents would need. Each one of these suchs up more bandwidth (it’s why private tracker users, often running 150-200 active torrents, find public torrents so slow.)
What many people don’t realize is that utorrent itself has a way of handling lots of inactive torrents. In the advanced preferences, there’s an option called queue.dont_count_slow_ul that is set to ‘true’ by default. This option means that inactive torrents (ones with an extremely slow, or zero upload) don’t count towards the queue limits. When your queue limits are reached with active torrents, the rest go back to queued status. That means your bandwidth can be used for active torrents, and not in ‘hoping’ on inactive ones, maximising your upload.
Of course, Delusion can’t really be blamed. I’ve read more than a few torrent guides at various private trackers, and they all give ridiculous settings. After all, it’s not like you need to know what you’re talking about, in order to run one, and that’s another reason why so many fail.