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Is it possible to enforce a share ratio on a torrent?

I have started a torrent, fairly large 25GB, and a few minutes later I noticed my bandwidth being choked out. Bringing up qbittorrent I saw that my upload was 8.3mB, quite high for my connection, and my download was about 2.3mB.

I very rarely limit my upload, or download for that matter, but when it interferes with normal activity I do. So I set the upload limit on the individual torrent to 150k. As I did, I noticed my download speed drop. Not just a little either. It dropped to around 90k from 2.3mB!

I thought this odd to see such a large drop, so I began 'playing' with the upload and download limiters. This is what I have found: My downloads are being regulated to about a 1:4 share ratio. That is if I limit my upload rate to 50k my download goes to around 12k. Limit download to 500, and I get around 120. My download speed change up or down depending on my upload limit.

As a test, I obtained Netlimiter 4. Generally I have no use for such programs, but I wanted to know if it was something in qbittorrent. It wasnt. When I limited the upload with Netlimiter I got the same exact behavior.

Maybe this is all normal, like I said, I dont usually limit uploads (or downloads).

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Win7 sp1 x64 w-updates
qbittorrent 4.2.1
IPVanish VPN -if that matters

over 200 seeders
over 700 in swarm

This thinig often happens on public (or very badly seeded) swarms for me. If I limit my upload speed, my download speed drops a lot. It only happens at these torrents though and it happened on all clients for me. It's something to do with the swarm - but yea I am no Bittorrent protocol expert... :/

hmm, ok. I guess its not abnormal then, maybe I never noticed before?

Thanks. If anyone else has any other insight that would be helpful