How do torrents work (in-depth)

[Unfocused]

Could anyone link me to an article that would explain, in-depth, how torrents work? I'm not talking about some basic explanation for people that want to start downloading through torrents and wonder how to go about this, but the actual mechanics.

The reason I'm asking this is that I'm getting some crap speeds on a download and wonder why one second I'm downloading at full speed from a peer and 10 seconds later the speed decreases dramatically or I get disconnected from the peer and am stuck with other ones downloading at 0,1kB/s, 2,5 kB/s, 4,1kB/s, 0,2kB/s (for example).

Graph (over a course of 5 minutes I think; 120kB/s would be ~my top speed):

So, I want to know how all this works.

 

[Vegeta897]

You download pieces of the file from people who have the pieces you need.

Your download is probably fluctuating because there's a fast seeder in that torrent and their bandwidth focus cycles around to the various users downloading, including you.

It looks like you're using uTorrent, you want to make sure the port it uses is forwarded. You can check to make sure it's working correctly in the options.

Other than that, it's all about how well the torrent is seeded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)

I don't think knowing exactly how torrents work is going to help you. It's not like you can change how many people are seeding a torrent and who uploads to you.

I'll say one thing though, in my experience, the more you are uploading on that torrent the more priority you have over the other peers, and the seeders will send you the data faster.

It looks like you have a pretty low upload limit. You might want to raise that.

Also, you had better be seeding your torrents to at least a 1.0 ratio, otherwise you're a hypocritical ****-****** for complaining about speeds. You want to know how torrents work, well they work by people seeding as much data as they download. It's a share network.

 

[YROC]

Sharing is caring. :3

 

[Unfocused]

Yeah, the knowledge might not help me, but this situation made me curious about the topic.

Also, I remember that at first (a few years ago) I had an unlimited upload speed which was apparently bottlenecking download requests from me, so everything was slow at all times. Then I read some guide which suggested limiting the upload to some fraction of the maximum upload speed and it improved my speeds a lot. So I just stuck with it. When I lived elsewhere and had 10Mbps instead of 1Mbps I set my upload limit to 10x my current one, honest! ;(

 

[Viperidae]

Also, you had better be seeding your torrents to at least a 1.0 ratio, otherwise you're a hypocritical ****-****** for complaining about speeds. You want to know how torrents work, well they work by people seeding as much data as they download. It's a share network.

RIDDLE ME THIS.

uTorrent NEVER uses my upload limit. I have it set at unlimited upload and the max that will be leeched total is like 700kb/s, and those are on rare days.

I have ports forwarded too.

 

[Raziaar]

Expand your docks. Not enough cargo ships can get through at any one time.

 

[Asus]

Yeah, what Vegeta said. If demand is low a direct download from a site will pretty much always be quicker.