ok this is my field, hehe, i'll take this one boys
OK, basically a peer is a user like you just downloading the file and a seed is someone who has the complete file and just uploads. Now the goal is to get more seeds than peers because you have to upload to peers and not to seed.
This is the thing though, upload speed counts, the more genrous you are to peers.. the higher priority you get with peers and seeds, then periodically your client connects to a tracker which is a fancy name for torrent server, the hub of the whole 'swarm' or group. Now if other peers have been saying good things about you and how generous you are to each other or to the tracker, the tracker gives you a good list of peers and seeds, that is to say, faster peers and better seeds (less congested) because it basically wants you to get the files faster so you can help seed.
NOW THE PROBLEM, you see torrents used to be fantastic on iburst, with the correct tweaks in azureus you could get 140KB/s easy... but then one day April came and they decided to shape it. Now torrent shaping isn't a normal throttle like you get when you are capped... they don't really limit your speed, they limit the amount of active connections you can have, this is a problem because most of the time in your average swarm peers only give a little bit to each other but the sheer amount of peers could add up.
For instance say you had 2KB/s from each peer/seed and 50 seeds in a swarm you could get 100KB/s which is great but because iburst limits you to around 8 active connections on a torrent swarm now you're lucky if you get 30KB/s and most of the time your speed will be in the single digits.
OK this is my favourite part... workarounds, now I've found a few worthy workarounds, call it a hobby, but one thing they all have in common is they are NOT user friendly and NOT reliable, that is to say if something comes out right now and you want it... prepare to sepnd time setting some stuff up. OK first you can use a tunnel basically you can tunnel through other protocols... if you don't even know what I'm talking about this isn't for you and you will need a server/VPN to pull this off. Next we have a bridge, this is liek tunneling but rather than converting on a low level at the core packet level it does so higher up... again, very hard to pull of.
The next one is a bit sketchy, Socks proxies.. you see if you connect to a socks proxy or route your traffic through one it doesnt look like torrent traffic to the WBS packet shaping software.. problem is try finding a free and reliable socks proxy, you will be changing all the time.. perhaps a few times through one download... also speed is an issue you literally have to check 10 000 proxies to find 100 working ones and check those 100 for 5 maybe 10 fast ones that can handle 50KB/s+ and after all that effort the next day the socks server will not work because its gone down.
Pretty depressing huh? Well this is where I come in... you see iBurst is geared towards http/ftp/mail etc traffic. So what I did was start a service called torrentflux (soon to be ranmed) about 3 months ago, the idea is this... you get an interface on a webserver, its a basic GUI that lets you upload torrents, start, stop, zip delete etc like you could on a torrent client on your PC. The benifit is you download the torrent data to a server, so say you need a 4GB linux ISO, you get the torrent, add to your interface and upload, start the torrent and it will download to the server as fast as the seeds/peers can send it (100mbit which is about 12.5 MEGABYTES per second maximum)
You then go into your downloads directory in the interface, you add the link to your download manager and download from the server at 120KB/s. I don't want to spam the board with this stuff, I suggest you try those other workarounds to see if they fit first... but if you are interested in a torrentflux account email me at
warren@wirelessza.co.za or PM me on this board. You pay for what you use, its cost price... just me using a spare server I have and other people seem to like it.
Look at the end of the day unless you pay for a 9GB account your torrents will suck... its just the way it is, even with a 9GB account it sucks.. the shaping isn't constant, it gets erratic and basically crappy. But HTTP is ALWAYS good, so why not get your torrent content through HTTP? It makes sense right?
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