Swarm Health

[snakyjake]

How can I view the swarm/health of a torrent?

When downloading I can see the availability, the ratio, and the distribution in the General tab.  However, that information is not available when the torrent payload has been completed.

Also, I can't see the number of seeders available for a torrent in the transfer window, nor does the tracker window have a seed column.

The objective I have for the question is to monitor the health (peers, seeds, availability, distribution among the swarm) of a torrent.

For example, the torrent in the screenshot looks dead, and I'm the only seeder, but I have a swarm of peers connected to me.  I'm considering using the "super seeding mode" to bring the swarm to health.

I also monitor the health of the torrents I have and adjust the available bandwidth and priority.  For torrents that have many seeders, I allocate less bandwidth than I do for a single seeder torrent.

[sledgehammer_999]

Libtorrent stops connecting to seeders when you become a seed. That's why those info aren't available.

[snakyjake]

I'm missing information about the health of a torrent.

Would it be beneficial to have a seeder column in the tracker list?

[ciaobaby]

If the requesting client is a seeding peer,  the tracker response may not even include the number of seeds.

[Switeck]

You're contacting the same trackers multiple times under slightly different announce URLs, so no surprise many of those are identical.
Save them some trouble -- please remove obvious duplicates.

"super seeding mode" won't work well with BT clients that don't report they HAVE pieces in a timely manner. Sadly, qBitTorrent is guilty of that.
http://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topi ... l#msg13616

[ciaobaby]

That is probably because of the default choking algorithm being used by libtorrent.

http://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topic,2762

[snakyjake]

Wouldn't you agree that having swarm health is good information to know?

[ciaobaby]

Sure:

But only if it reasonably accurate, with the overly long period that some trackers seem to cache peer IDs it can be seriously misleading in some instances, and if your client is seeding, you may not even get information about other seeds that may or may not be online.

[Switeck]

If having accurate swarm health is only possible by doing constant encrypted handshakes with all the seeds on the torrent even when already a seed, it's not worth it.

And swarm health is a questionable measurement anyway.
Any busy torrent swarm can be expected to contain huge numbers of dead ips.
Some peers+seeds may be hopelessly firewalled or on hostile ISPs and be pretty much impossible to connect to.
Some have multiple ips (IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time for instance) and can get double-counted.
Some may have their upload speed set to 1 KB/sec.
There are some incentives for peers to lie about their upload speed to others, to encourage seeds to give them more.
So counting each seed as 1 and each peer based on their percent complete is insufficient and only marginally helpful.

[snakyjake]

I get reasonable results by checking the trackers on a torrent website.  I get enough information that allows me to take actions on certain torrents. 
I'd be satisfied to get the same information from the web site displayed conveniently in QBT.