As a torrent seeder, does one’s max upload speed affect their likelihood of connecting w/ leechers? I know about port forwarding and all that jazz, but suppose a leecher adds a torrent with 10 seeders—does the leecher’s client give any sort of preferential treatment for seeders w/ faster connections or is it basically each seeder has an equal (in this case, 10%) chance of being the chosen one? In other words, do seeders w/ normie home internet connections have a disadvantage over those w/ the faster connections?
The downloader will make a connection to as many of them as possible. I believe it doesn’t care about the capabilities of the seeder at all as long as it has the piece it’s looking for.
I don’t believe so. I’m fairly certain it’ll connect to as many as your settings will allow. I connect to 40+ seeders fairly routinely.
Though there are other settings that will effect who connects to you or not. Encryption is one. Some leechers require the seeder sends an encrypted stream. Another is the port forwarding. If you don’t have your port forwarding settings set up properly on your client and router then not as many will connect.
On the other hand if your home network upload is maxed out due to low cable/dsl upload speeds, that’l stop new connections too.
You definitely have a disadvantage with a slower connection. Faster connections will always have preference. This is intentional and desired, usually by everyone involved. As a leecher, I certainly want my client to connect to the fastest sources it can to download the torrent as quickly as possible. As a racer, I want the same. The only injury in this case is to people with slow connections as their only source of “upload credit” trying to earn “ratio” (something which has nothing to do with the bittorrent protocol itself and is an invention of private tracker communities carried over from the days of ratio FTP sites).
Good trackers using ratio as a requirement will recognize that these folks are put at a significant disadvantage, but are still doing their part and providing value by long term seeding and will find another way to reward them, typically with bonus points of some kind. Shitty or new-user-hostile trackers won’t (you know who I’m talking about) but that’s their choice and if you have you mind set on participating there, you might be much better off renting a seedbox at first until at least you get your ratio up to a level where you’re comfortable.
