utorrent setup guide

[God]

Please add this useful feature in.
I loved utorrent because of it, it simplifies things. You don't gotta implement a speedtest but an automatic calculation of settings based on inputted upload speeds.
I know there are calculators online but it would just be better as you can adjust it to whatever, every calc is different and you as the developers should know what is best for qBittorrent.

Not everyone wants to spend a bunch of time trying to figure this out and it would be a simple yet amazing addition for users like me who just want to get it working quickly.
Everything would be done automatically such as setting up queue and all that just like utorrent and users can further manually adjust if they want. 

[Switeck]

[quote="God"]automatic calculation of settings based on inputted upload speeds.[/quote]In short, It is not simple to do.

I've been working on both how and why to configure BitTorrent clients for over 10 years, but what I have is not finalized, calibrated, or fully tested so I haven't released it.

Settings to maximize downloaded amount can differ considerably from settings to maximize uploaded amount.
"Upload speeds" is not sufficient information, because quite a few internet connections have burst speeds that last just long enough for a speed test to measure but are considerably higher than max sustainable upload speed. Peak evening hours might be far lower.
Whether the internet connection is shared or needs to be available for other activities as well (such as online gaming which often requires low pingtimes) can be a huge consideration in choosing settings.
Using a proxy, VPN, IPv6, or just being firewalled in general might require different limits.

BitTorrent also has core rules (Tit-For-Tat, Snubbing, Endgame, and Peering to name a few) that are little understood but force limits on settings much like a "never exceed speed" for airplanes.
qBitTorrent has a couple quirks to make configuring it considerably different than uTorrent  -- these might change even from version-to-version of qBitTorrent! Half-open limit and retry rate works differently, upload slots can be limited globally as well as per torrent, multi-tracker behavior is currently in violation of BitTorrent specifications (with terrible consequences for trackers -- many are going offline for good), and disk cache can under extreme conditions crash not only qBitTorrent but the whole OS as well (at least under Windows).

There are even settings combinations that appear to "work great" for the 1 person using them, but can be bad for others on the same torrents or very bad if LOTS of people use the same aggressive settings. Tragedy of the commons stuff...

[Nemo]

Im not such a fan of those setup guides. Switeck described my thoughts exactly.

[Switeck]

My greatest concern about releasing a guide/chart showing "never exceed these" values at listed upload speeds for qBitTorrent...is that's exactly the values lots of people will end up using, when instead they shouldn't be using values anywhere near them!

Worse, thanks to the use of qBitTorrent's Scheduler's lower speed settings (which seem to default to 10 KB/sec DL and UL) and/or manually lowering upload speed later...people would greatly exceed the "never exceed these" values and might not even know it.

qBitTorrent doesn't give any warning when horrible settings are used with it, nor does there seem an easy way to add that.

Internally qBitTorrent seems to have minimal sanity checks for impossible values -- such as when someone has queueing set to limit max active uploads to 0, or global max upload slots set to 0, or per-torrent connection max greater than global max connections.

If you want highest possible download speed, don't look for "Magic BitTorrent Settings" -- instead look for Good Torrents!
YouTube 'uTorrent Speedup' videos tend to be the WORST, often with impossible settings combinations -- such as more connections per torrent than globally allowed or more downloading torrents than max active torrents.

If you are connected to 50 peers but only uploading to 4 (because qBitTorrent is set to 4 upload slots max per torrent), don't expect much download speed from the 40+ peers you're NOT uploading to! Those 40+ peers may also be connected to 50 peers but uploading to only 4 peers at a time, so they almost never upload to you...unless you're uploading to them faster than most of their peers. Your upload slots are "given out" to the peers uploading the fastest to your peer, plus 1 "roaming" optimistic unchoke upload slot that tries to find a new faster/fastest peer. The few nuts that set their upload slots really high often upload to every peer...but at <1 KB/sec each!
This is why adding more connections per torrent may not increase download speeds.

If you have bad speeds even with good torrents, perhaps your ISP is to blame? (Some ISPs want to take over the internet by demanding money from websites they don't own and their customers use heavily.)

[friendlytherapist]

[quote="Switeck"]
My greatest concern about releasing a guide/chart showing "never exceed these" values at listed upload speeds for qBitTorrent...is that's exactly the values lots of people will end up using, when instead they shouldn't be using values anywhere near them!

Worse, thanks to the use of qBitTorrent's Scheduler's lower speed settings (which seem to default to 10 KB/sec DL and UL) and/or manually lowering upload speed later...people would greatly exceed the "never exceed these" values and might not even know it.

qBitTorrent doesn't give any warning when horrible settings are used with it, nor does there seem an easy way to add that.

Internally qBitTorrent seems to have minimal sanity checks for impossible values -- such as when someone has queueing set to limit max active uploads to 0, or global max upload slots set to 0, or per-torrent connection max greater than global max connections.

If you want highest possible download speed, don't look for "Magic BitTorrent Settings" -- instead look for Good Torrents!
YouTube 'uTorrent Speedup' videos tend to be the WORST, often with impossible settings combinations -- such as more connections per torrent than globally allowed or more downloading torrents than max active torrents.

If you are connected to 50 peers but only uploading to 4 (because qBitTorrent is set to 4 upload slots max per torrent), don't expect much download speed from the 40+ peers you're NOT uploading to! Those 40+ peers may also be connected to 50 peers but uploading to only 4 peers at a time, so they almost never upload to you...unless you're uploading to them faster than most of their peers. Your upload slots are "given out" to the peers uploading the fastest to your peer, plus 1 "roaming" optimistic unchoke upload slot that tries to find a new faster/fastest peer. The few nuts that set their upload slots really high often upload to every peer...but at <1 KB/sec each!
This is why adding more connections per torrent may not increase download speeds.

If you have bad speeds even with good torrents, perhaps your ISP is to blame? (Some ISPs want to take over the internet by demanding money from websites they don't own and their customers use heavily.)
[/quote]

So what you're saying Switeck, is we should use QBTs' default rate limits, connection limits, ect . Just don't mess with them and we will generally get the highest up/down rate our isp allows?

[Switeck]

[quote="friendlytherapist"]So what you're saying Switeck, is we should use QBTs' default rate limits, connection limits, ect . Just don't mess with them and we will generally get the highest up/down rate our isp allows?[/quote]No, not the highest...but probably >50% of it, unless it's being throttled or there's bad service (high pings, packet loss).

If you have 1-5 megabit/sec upload, those settings are probably ok for basic use -- like 1-3 seeding+downloading public torrents total at a time.

But if you want to do anything more complicated, like use 1 or more private trackers OR lots of public torrents with varying levels of activity OR purely seeding OR have bad networking...the default settings are simply terrible.

And if you want to do all those at once, there's a couple conflicting goals right there -- whether to give much/most of your upload to private trackers, whether to possibly sacrifice download speeds to maximize seeding upload speeds, whether to have 1000's of connections at once to support 100+ connections that you only need on 1 particularly busy but huge public torrent that has LOTS of shitty peers and seeds that all seem to DL/UL at <10 KB/sec max each...and your router slows down and/or crashes if it's ever pushed beyond 100 connections at once.

These conflicting goals means it's impossible to create 1-size-fits-all settings that can do all those well, even if it adjusts for max upload speed.

[KitKat]

May i suggest instead of a "Use these settings" bible/guide we provide a splash page that just Q&A's common questions with examples to inform the user about what settings mean and what they should be setting them to?
Or a button that opens a browser to a github/forums hosted webpage that explains things + links them to speedtests and actually tells them how to read it..

Then we'll have a more educated user base who could then assist the community better ;p

(could also put ads on the page it redirects to so @sledgehammer999 gets some financial support lmao)

[magao]

I find that the most important setting of all is a router with a good QoS implementation ...

Or if torrenting on Windows (especially if the same machine is used for other things such as gaming), cfosSpeed (which I was a happy user of for >10 years, but no longer need thanks to my ASUS DSL-AC68U + moving most of my infrastructure to a QNAP TS-453 Pro).

[Switeck]

A good QoS implementation on a router only helps when your internet connection is consistent speed-wise.
But it's still a bad idea to let qBitTorrent (or most any BT client) slam into the QoS limits repeatedly -- peers and seeds can see the resulting lag and packet loss as meaning YOUR end is a bad peer or seed that needs to be snubbed or banned.

This is why even with QoS limits a BT client needs to be set to not normally hit them.
Also, if the reason your internet connection is suffering speed issues while running qBitTorrent is due to the router overloading from too many connections at once...having the router run QoS on top of that (more cpu load for it) can make things worse instead of better.

To reiterate about settings limits/setup guide for qBitTorrent:

Upload Speed Max forces limits on almost everything!
Beyond 100 KILOBYTES/second usable upload speed max, there's still a LOT of flexibility in what you can do -- whether you want to download 5 torrents at once or only 1 is up to you!
The "sweet spot" settings is a pretty broad range, especially as upload speeds get higher.

Nobody wants to download from a "seed" that only uploads for 1 minute an hour (connected to 100 peers but only uploading to 1 at a time) and/or at 1 KB/sec (low upload speed limit and/or uploading to too many peers at once on each torrent), so please don't use settings that cause that.

A high max half-open connections limit won't help you download faster after maybe the first 10 minutes of starting a torrent...instead all the handshakes and disconnections it causes will DECREASE available download and upload speed that could make downloading and uploading torrents faster.
If not firewalled in qBitTorrent, I don't recommend setting that over 10 for anything short of 100+ megabit/second symmetric fiber lines.