Hi.

I think I know the answer, but wanted to be sure as I am, as the title suggests, a noob.

I've been torrenting for a couple of years but recently decided to actually care about what I do, so the question is :

Is it better to upload little to many people, or lots to a few people?

Before today I would upload to 1.3 ratio and someone might be getting 500k b/s out, and four or five people getting say 50k b/s out, but having reviewed my settings I am now uploading a large 47gig file to 16 or 20 people at around a steady 50k b/s out each.

Is that a better way to share my downloaded file?

I'll put my hands up and tell you that I was a fan of downloading a lot, so often had many I was trying to share to a good ratio, but now download a lot less and want to be sharing in the correct manner.

Thanks in advance.

donut.

You are starting off right... by thinking.


I am not sure there is a hard and fast rule that would apply all the time. If our goal is to help the dissemination of information, media we really can't know what the few who get a lot fast will then do with what they have downloaded. I used to download with torrents then share it on opennap and other p2p networks. That re-sharing never shows on any bittorrent ratio.

So much depends on the culture and ethics of the receiver and from that perspective I do think we have somewhat of a cultural social problem. I think too many, perhaps the majority of those using bittorrent clients to get files limit their concern to just that...getting rather than giving. They tend to be 'takers' rather than 'leavers'. The fact that the bittorent was created/designed the way it was speaks to that character flaw, seeking something for nothing, being a leech, a parasite, selfishly looking out only for oneself instead of being a contributing member of a community. Bittorrent protocol was an attempt to provide a technical solution to that sociopathic behavior by rewarding downloaders who reciprocate and re-send what they receive.

Regardless of the thoughts behind the bittorrent design, it is obvious that there are still ugly people who will go out of their way to cheat the system, to be relentless 'takers' and not givers. A 'solution' for some is to create/join anti-social private tracker sites which tend to turn shared media into a virtual capitalistic commodity - how ironic. (see link to dime.pdf below)

I have read that the average half-life of a torrent is 10-30 days (though I think this is more imprecise anecdotal observation than actual fact and this would certainly be affected by the nature/topic of the torrent content).

So for those reasons and many more... I would go with slower feeds to more users. I know what it is like trying to download files when only having a dialup connection. Worse, I had a fascist ISP that would force auto-disconnect every 2 hours. At a time when there were no good DL managers that would resume DL on reconnect, forcing the user/loser to start again from the beginning. Obviously bittorrent solves that situation. I have some torrents that remain unfinished after months or even years with no seeds and at times they finish when that obscure user comes along who has it and is still sharing it.

I now am privileged to have a reliable and relatively speedy broadband service, but I have to realize how much better I have it than so many others, especially those in lesser developed countries and even in rural USA. I can still recall more primitive p2p programs that had functions to disconnect/ignore/ban uses with slower data rates. How cruel such impatience and arrogance!

For those sorts of reasons, given that those with the fastest connections may be prone to grab and go as soon as they get what they want, I would rather dribble out my shares to as many people as possible and let the bittorrent reciprocity protocol sort it out after that. The more decentralized the data the better.


I will download lots too at times. That said, much of the media I have I haven't got around to reading/listing to or watching. I hope to one day but time ... you know. I mainly DL files ( that I think are socially significant) so I can mirror them, to UL them to others. I tend towards information/documentaries that are educational and inspirational, with a leaning towards social justice and making the world a little nicer place to live in. I try not to waste my BW and disk space on the latest distractive and  escapist fad games, pop music or movies. For hundreds of the torrents I share, I am often the only one I ever see seeding them. And I do not stop at any ratio. For dozens of these torrents I have a ratio of over 100:1, one (about Gandhi) has a ratio of over 280:1 and that is with 7 other seeds! (Just thinking about that makes me sad! I personally uploaded over 280 copies of that torrent, and no telling how much the other seeds have uploaded it, and yet only 8 of us continue seeding it.)

I currently have my UL BW locked to 8 mb/s and have no problem flatlining at that level, 24/7.  I set my UL queue to 30-50 slots. I do skew the UL BW by giving higher priority to certain select torrents, but other than that tend not to micro-manage the process. The result of this is

UL rate   # of
(KiB/s):  Torrents:
100-250   2-3
50-100    2-3
30-50     2-3
10-30     5-8
1-10      ~30

And lastly, thank you for asking about this. When I tried to find some quick links about the half-life of torrents to reference here, I found a couple very interesting research papers that you might like to read also:

Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent's Lifetime
 https://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/compsci512/spring14/15-744/S07/papers/bittorrent.pdf

Economics of BitTorrent Communities
 http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~hq/papers/dime.pdf