Coding Passion

The Goals of a Seeder

Before we start discussing what are the good and the bad habits when you use BitTorrent we have to define what the goal of a seeder is. First of all a Seeder is intended as the first seeder in this article, the one who creates the Torrent-File and therefore the first who uploads any data to the other users. He wants his file to be spread to the other users and possibly detach it from himself, by detach I mean that the torrent continues to be spread without the need that the first seeder has to be still seeding. However as I explain beyond

Don’t Zip!

Often people package their files together in one compressed archize (zip-files, or one of the other compression mechanism like, rar or ace) and then generate a Torrent-File out of them. There are several reasons why this not a good idea.

• A waste of disk space: zipping your files is a real waste of disk space for both the seeder and the leecher, because to be seeding the file you have to have the compressed file at hand, while to use its content you need to uncompress it. Let’s see the usual scenario: A user downloads a Film with BitTorrent. The file that is being downloaded is a zip archive containing both the Film and some junk files that nobody whants to see and will be the first to be deleted. The user has to extract the movie from the archive to watch it. Therefore he needs twice the space to uncompress it, and maybe, as it so often happens, first needs to delete something else to free the needed space first. Once uncompressed he has the movie twice on the disk, so he can throw away one of the two. Which one will he choose? Right: the compressed one, thus another possible seed has vanished…
• It’s completely useless because nearly all the data on the net is already compressed with media-specific codecs (see DivX for movies, OGG or MP3 for music, pdf for Documents) the general purpose compressions like zip, rar or alike have very small or no effect whatsoever.
• Seeds disappear: basically this is already explained above, but I have to press on this fact that disappearing seeds are the main reason for torrents to disappear too. Users often choose the Torrents with the most Seeds, as they are most likely to last until they finished downloading, thus the number of seeders not only makes downloads faster but also makes sure that new users will come.
  

Don’t steal Torrents!

What is stealing anyway? We don’t speak of physically stealing a property from each other, since often the contents aren’t owned by anyone, but instead we speak of stealing when one downloads a torrent and then creates a new torrent, only to get the credits for it.
Again this is one of the worst inventions in the history of BitTorrent, or in fact P2P in general, stealing torrents has a really bad impact on the performance of a torrent. The base principle of BitTorrent is that for a single file we have a large user base that share the file amongst each other. By stealing a torrent you split the userbase in many different smaller userbases that do not share amongst each other, thus making a death of the torrents more likely. Re-Seeding is no good either. Re-Seeding means that a torrent that is almost dead is recreated with a new torrent file and registering it in the tracker once more. It tends to split the userbase just like stealing the files, thus speeding up the death of the torrent. As long as there is at least one active seeder it is not a good idea to artificially enforce a republishing of the file, making it temporarily available in tracker news, as this is the only effect it has. Also reseeding tends to confuse the users as they don’t know anymore which file to download and what exactly the difference is.

Don’t stop seeding!

This is easy to understand, how do you expect others to keep on seeding when even you don’t seed anymore? Also you ensure that there is at least one full active copy around, therefore encouraging new users to download your file (files that have no seeds active are less popular and most likely to die out soon). Keeping the Torrents active is hard work but it’s worth it. We are gearing towards quality torrents and not sheer mass. By creating this small effort on the side of the seeder we ensure that the things that he publishes are really worth it and not just the usual junk for the masses.
Off course it’s not needed that all the torrents a seeder has ever published are in his sharing queue, it’s enough that the seeder checks periodically which torrents need a seeder (I strongly recommend that at least a 5% of seeders should be the absolute minimum) and if needed he just puts the torrents into action. I’m currently working on a tool that allows Seeders and others to create RSS-Feeds with theis torrents to watch , and therefore making it easier to coope with the duties of a seeder.

Don’t use Multitracker

As said before splitting the userbase into smaller one is a really bad thing to do, and the most common error while creating a Torrent is that of specifying multiple trackers. This may sound as a good idea, because if the main tracker is down there are still the fallback trackers, but, if you chose a good tracker, it is really unlikely that the tracker becomes unresponsive or is taken down completely. If a BitTorrent client can’t contact the first tracker he will attempt the others, thus distributing the users over more trackers and slowing down everything. Many believe that if a client is given a multitracker torrent it will check all torrents specified and connect to them all, thus creating a sort of meta-tracker that is made up of the others, but for most clients this is not true, they will just select a single tracker to which they connect. With more and more clients supporting Azureus’ DHT Tracker the need for multitracker torrents is non-existant, because if a tracker is down, one just uses the DHT tracker which is never down.


Sadly most BitTorrent Services, are shortlived, Torrents are kept on the main page only for a few days or even less, and therefore they are published only for that time. I’d like to thank mininova and ThePirateBay for taking another aproach, away from the shortlived "publish-on-mainpage" and more an archive of good and working torrents. If we want to use the BitTorrent infrastructure for serious distribution of information, this is the way to go, information should be easily accessible , not only for a short period of time!