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#Post#: 1356--------------------------------------------------
Intermediate Torrenting
By: Red Date: November 1, 2013, 2:37 am
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If you've read my other guide on torrenting found here
HTML http://pargee.createaforum.com/tutorials-guides/how-to-torrent/,<br
/>hopefully this article will be of more use to you.
My disclaimers and advice from the last thread still stand.
I want to provide you guys with tips I find useful when
torrenting. I use BitTorrent, which some say is more
heavyweight, but feature-lacking than uTorrent. I couldn't care
less, personally, what I use gets the job done and I have it
configured to fir my needs.
-BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT-
I'm not sure if I ever explained what bandwidth is, but it's
like a highway of sorts. Some highways have just two lanes, one
incoming and one for normal traffic. Some have much more, and
odd numbers of lanes. When a house connects to an Internet
Service Provider (ISP), there is usually only a certain amount
of bandwidth, or lanes, available. The more you pay, often more
lanes open up, and more traffic can travel at one time.
Torrenting puts a heavy strain on a households bandwidth,
because files downloaded have a certain capacity of volume they
take up in your computer's memory and need to be transferred
somehow. Typically, data will be transferred at the fastest rate
possible, but is limited by speed limits (often how fast your
modem and router can work with internet traffic), parking
structure capacity (how much hard drive space your computer has)
and number of lanes (bandwidth). These all apply to where your
data is coming from too. It's generally safe to say that an
internet connection is as strong as its weakest link, so if
Henry decides that he wants to increase his bandwidth, he won't
download a file any faster is Louise on the other end has crappy
bandwidth. With torrenting, this isn't so much of an issue. If
your max download rate is at 1,000 KB/s, and you connect to 5
seeders who have a 200 KB/s max rate, you'll still most likely
be able to download at 1,000 KB/s because you can draw on
resources from all of the seeders at once.
Some tips for improving your internet speed and to make sure you
have as much bandwidth allotted to your computer at any given
time, is to make sure you're connected via Ethernet (wired)
connection directly to your router/hub/switch or modem if you
don't have a router/hub/switch. There's nothing wrong with
torrenting over WiFi, it's just that wired connections will
almost always be faster and more reliable. Also, you can make
sure that you torrent in the middle of the night as you sleep or
when you're away, or even if your working on your computer, but
the more computers connected to your network, the slower your
connection becomes. Also, streaming music and video when you
torrent is sure to put a dent in how much bandwidth your torrent
program can use. If you want my advice, don't even think about
gaming or video chatting unless you KNOW you can handle it, but
as a rule of thumb, you can't, so don't, please. Also, hosting
some game servers, http, or ftp servers, or any other thing that
requires a serious connection through ports in your firewall or
router, is sometimes not possible while torrenting. For some
reason, it can mess up trackers and these other things take up
bandwidth anyhow. If you NEED to run a server and torrent
(don't) make sure you do so each on separate machines. Watching
movies you've downloaded over torrents doesn't take up
bandwidth, and only effects the resources on your computer, so
you can watch the first episode of your favorite anime in 1080p
while the next one is downloading unimpeded.
Let's say you download something. Anything. And you have a
bandwidth cap of, oh, 200 GB (gigabytes) of data a month. Well
once it's done torrenting, it will usually go to seed right away
and start distributing copies of itself to any passing leeches.
This is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing, because
you are sharing a file with the world for free and perpetuating
the use of torrenting for others, but it's a bad thing because,
unmonitored, it can rack up tons and tons of bandwidth usage,
and on the off chance, can deplete your 200 GB allowance pretty
damn quickly. If you have your torrent program set to run as a
service (in the background, starting automatically when the
computer starts up) then you may run more of a risk of this. I
do not run my torrent program as a service, and manually start
it every time I want to seed or download a file; the control I
have is fine for me. Nonetheless, most clients track your
"ratio", or how much you've uploaded a file vs downloaded. You
can set your client to stop seeding when you have a ratio of
1.000 or 100% on a file. That means that you have seeded enough
information to perpetuate a whole 'nother copy somewhere out
there in the world. A ratio of 1.0 is fine for most or popular
torrents, but for torrents with 30 seeders or less, try seeding
to a ratio of 1.5 or 2.0 instead. You should be able to set a
global ratio (I have my global at 1.0 for all torrents by
default) but you should also be able to modify that ratio for
individual torrents as well. Look up how to do this for your own
torrenting client online, every one's different. As an added
note: make sure you throttle your bandwidth as necesarry. I have
both my downloads and uploads set to receive and distribute my
maximum amount of bandwidth so I can download files at my
maximum speed and seed to my ratio as fast and I can connect to
leeches.
I should also point out that your upload bandwidth will
naturally be much lower than how fast you can download.
Sometimes there's not much you can do to change this as a
residential customer to your ISP, since most ISPs frown upon
residential customers running servers from their homes (but
people do it anyway).
If you haven't figured it out yet, don't torrent on a public
WiFi or through TOR. Torrenting on a public wifi clogs up the
system for other users if not throttled way down, making
torrenting virtually unusable. Torrenting through TOR will
immediately de-anonymize you and also clog up the TOR network,
making it unusable for everybody and exposing yourself in the
process.
-Hardware-
tl;dr - Get gigabyte hardware and hard drives with a write speed
of 2+ gigs or something.
Let's say you're along the same vein as me and have a slight
desire to take your torrenting to the next level. You can't
blame yourself, you have good taste and a talent for efficiency
(maybe). You may be interested in buying new hardware to suit
your new computing lifestyle.
First things first, a network is only as strong as its weakest
link, in some occasions, and replacing the stragglers can be
well worth it in the long run. We're going to take a look at
network hardware.
The following tips will be directly effected by your maximum
up/down speed throttled by your ISP. Let's say you have X sum of
money and can afford a fancy fiber optic cable to your home.
TERABYTES AND TERABYTES OF FURRY PRON STREAMED TO YOUR DOOR, WHO
COULD WANT MORE!? Ahem... Sorry. I'm just going to mention that
if your parents are on the fence about upgrading your internet,
take a look at the specs and see what they plan on changing.
Help them increase your household's total bandwidth if possible,
because it's no use in getting better hardware if your one
source of information coming in and out of your home is almost a
snail.
Next, you have to understand that a Router can assign IP
addresses to connected computer and oftentimes acts as a WiFi
host. Routers are your friend, they typically have a set amount
of bandwidth for each ethernet port individually. Switches are
like routers, but don't give things IP addresses and probably
don't distribute WiFi. Each Ethernet connection has its own
individual bandwidth. Switches are also kind of your friend.
Hubs are probably best to stay away from. They are like lazy
switches. They share their bandwidth across all of its ethernet
ports, so if john on ethernet port 1 decides it's high time to
watch Netflix, and Jane on 3 or 4 or any other hub is dungeon
crawling, they're going to have to compromise or have a hell of
a time. You probably only have to worry about routers for now. I
would recommend buying Gigabit (that's bit, not byte) hardware,
as it is better than 10Mbit and 100Mbit. It has a bandwidth of
1000Mbits, or about 1Gbit per port. Make sure your modem can
also handle the load as well.
Next, look at the ethernet controller on your computer. If you
have a laptop, if the ethernet port is crappy, then you have no
real choice but to get a new laptop. If you own a desktop, check
your motherboard specifications if it has an ethernet port, and
see what type of bandwidth it can handle. If it sucks, but has
PCI slots
HTML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect,<br
/>you may be in luck to make an improvement. On the motherboard
of
your computer, there are these things called busses, and just
like the traffic outside your computer, they are effected by
bandwidth. PCI ports only have so much bandwidth allotted to
them on the board, so make sure you check your board
specifications and what type of PCI ports it has. If it's
crappy, consider replacing it, but this is a much bigger job,
since an upgrade could mean having to get a new hard drive for
different connections and a new power supply to handle the load.
Let's say your motherboard checks out and is good. You can go
buy a gigabit ethernet PCI card for your computer and have
better capacity for internet bandwidth.
Next, look at your RAM. If your motherboard is pre-2007, it's
probably time to get a new one. Get at LEAST 2 gigs, but even
that won't do you any good. Shoot for 4+. We don't really need
to concern ourselves with the CPU, that'll just do its thing.
The next big thing is your hard drive. Solid state drives are
extremely fast, but extremely expensive for a significantly
lower volume of storage. I would recommend a 120+gigabyte one if
you've got the cash. It'll let you do most things, and if you're
concerned with storage, I have another surprise for you. If you
can't afford a solid state, just go with any modern hard disk
that has at least 1 gigabyte write speed if that's possible.
(it's late and I'm too lazy to check how fast they typically
write). This will allow any torrented things to be received well
by your computer. That's about all there is to optimizing your
computer for data exchange.
----
If you have USB 3.0 or Firewire, you should consider using
external hard drives for extra storage. They are relatively
cheap, but don't provide any sort of data protection when used
just by themselves. I would recommend them more for grab-and-go
situations where you need a ton of data at X location, stat,
like AMN. Keep in mind that these can be delicate.
----
The mother of all FTP and Torrenting hardware, the NAS, or
Network Attached Storage, is possibly the best way to solidify
your passage into computer geek of the week. I'm not going to
get into too much detail because no one cares, probably, but
basically it's a collection of hard drives in a separate machine
from your computer. Max capacities can store up to 8 terabytes
usually without any backup across four disks for consumer
systems. They're low-power and really only serve as a memory
controller on the network. These are a great option if you have
a lot of machines around your house that should optimally store
all their media like songs and stuff on one central location.
The best part about a NAS is that you can do something that's
called RAID and it is not raping and pillaging small villages in
Scandinavia. RAID, simply put, helps back up a hard drive onto
another hard drive just in case one fails or otherwise breaks.
This is incredibly useful when your 120gigs of music and 360
gigs of HD video are at stake and you'd rather not have to spend
all night retorrenting all of Little House on the Prairie (hey,
a person's gotta get their fix of homely values and conservatism
somewhere...). NASs are definitely for the cereal at heart, and
not for the weak. As an added bonus, some even come with
torrenting software built in. *hallelujah echos from the
distance*
----
-AFTERWORD-
If for some reason you are unsatisfied with this guide, you need
to go to bed, because you're probably up way too late and know
it, because I know I am. Any questions or further torrenting
help, I'm available and google exists. Also, I apologize for the
exponential jump in complexity. My excitement was hard to
contain while writing this article, but alas, the article has
met its bane and has since been laid down, here, on display.
Enjoy it, stare, drool, not on the keyboard, back a little
further, there. Thanks for letting me waste your time! :DD
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