I’ll admit, when I first started torrent I was not really familiar with how it worked and how important seeding was. I would just use magnet links without configuration to save the torrent and seed after completion. Well… I have finally, got myself back to 1.00 after a couple months and working to try to always seed double what I get for each torrent.

Often times I was one of the few random seeders available for some of these torrents. Friendly reminder to give back because you never know when you’re one of the rare cases that can complete someones long lost file download!

  • merc
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    15 hours ago

    I may be wrong, but I think you can even game the system a bit. I think the way the torrent protocol works, it prefers to trade packets between people who don’t have a complete download before it requests missing bits from seeders. So, if you restrict your download bandwidth so you avoid becoming a seeder for as long as possible, you’ll upload more stuff. If I’m right, then the ultimate way to do things would be to grab as much of the content as quickly as possible, but slow way down when you’re at 99% complete. That way you have the chunks that everyone else wants but you don’t get counted as a seeder.

    I haven’t bothered looking into the protocol to verify this, but it always seems that I upload less when something’s complete vs. when it’s in progress. But, that could just be an illusion.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      I have also observed this behavior, but only when the file is new and the only seeder is the uploader.

      Hower I’m kinda curious to test it out. Any idea if there’s some way to script qbittorrent to somehow mimic this behavior?

      Download until 99,0% completed with 100% of download speed, then reduce to 0.1% of my download speed until finished?

      • merc
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        4 hours ago

        No, I don’t know how to script to test it, sorry. But, if you do test it let me know what you find.