[H-GEN] Bittorrent query

[David Harrison]

>    OK so what is a reasonable download speed to expect?

Generally, the more 'new' a torrent is more likely it is you'll get 
better downloads speeds, simply because there are more likely to be more 
peers on it.

You mentioned downloading ISO bundles as being slow - I regularly 
download new ISOs (Linux distros, etc) to mirror them and if I do it 
within the first 48 hours of release, I'm surprised if I'm getting less 
than 200-400kbytes/sec (I regularly get speeds of up to 
1000-2000kbytes/sec downloading with similar upload speeds).

If I have to re-mirror something a couple weeks/months after though I 
find the number of seeders has dropped massively and I tend to get 
terrible speeds (I was downloading a Debian PowerPC CD at less than 
1kb/s; I ended up giving up after 2 days and finding an HTTP mirror).

Most of the people I talk to who use it regularly (and a few people here 
have already mentioned this) seem to recommend capping your upload so it 
doesn't flood your upstream and then taking it from there.

Its also handy to be able to find out how many peers are seeding a given 
torrent so you know if its likely to get better or worse over time - 
this is not always possible but if you open up the .torrent in a text 
editor you'll usually see the announce address, which will look 
something like http://syd2.ausgamers.com:6969/announce . If you chuck 
http://syd2.ausgamers.com:6969 into a browser you'll get a status page 
with some info about the seeds from the tracker (this doesn't work with 
all trackers though; the one I'm running there is the official BT 
tracker).

-- dave