This evening I tried upgrading from uTorrent 2.2.1 to uTorrent 3.0. After a few hours I switched back again.

I have a dedicated torrent computer which runs 24/7. I'm seeding about 200 torrents, of which maybe 20 are active at any given moment. (And that is how I've gotten my BakaBT exchange rate up to 10.7.)

When I first started doing this, I let uTorrent use as much upstream as it wanted, and Comcast capped me at 240 kbytes per second. So I set uTorrent to limit at 200 kb/s and it's been like that ever since.

With all the versions of uTorrent I've used up to 2.2.1, it's always saturated the uplink, if it possibly could. There are occasional events which can cause my uplink to falter a bit, but the vast majority of the time it's right at the rail. But with 3.0 it only averaged maybe half that.

And nearly all of what it was using was on the one-and-only download I've got running right now. I'm trying to get the 1080p raw for "Sacred Blacksmith", which has been a bit painful because there isn't a reliable seed for it. It comes and goes, but over the course of a couple of days I've managed to reach 92%. I've also done a fair amount of uploading on that torrent, and right now my ratio is 1.09.

Under 3.0, that was pretty much the only torrent I was doing any significant uploading on. There were a bunch of others where I was running maybe 2K/s, and I was running anything from 50K to 150K on this one. The rest of my bandwidth went to waste. In the few hours I tried 3.0, I don't think it ever saturated the line.

They've completely rewritten the strategy code which allocates bandwidth, somehow. I looked all the way through the configuration frames and I couldn't find anything that would make it work the way I want it to. Which is to say, to work the way 2.2.1 does, which divides the upstream evenly among every leech irrespective of the torrent they're on.

It looks like 3.0 prioritizes torrents where your exchange rate is low. And once your exchange rate tops a certain threshold, it says "To hell with those guys; what have they done for me lately" and chokes them.

So I retreated back to 2.2.1 and I'll be staying with it.

UPDATE: Actually, I did find what I think was controlling that. There was a field which defaulted to "150%" which seemed to indicate that when it reached that upload threshold (which either means 1.5:1 or 2.5:1) then it would crank back. But the documentation also said that changing that field in the setup frame would only affect new torrents. I would have needed to change all the existing ones individually -- and I have 161 running. (I used to have 220, but a couple of weeks ago I trimmed it back quite a lot.)

Manually changing the settings on 161 torrents is not my idea of a good time. That's why I retreated.

When new versions appear, if they do, I'll be watching the change history closely to see if they did something about it. But for the time being there doesn't seem to be any good reason to upgrade. It didn't look like it really offered me anything I don't already have with 2.2.1.

...so why did I upgrade? Well, the one seed on that torrent that I seemed able to connect to wasn't ever giving me any bytes. It was also running uTorrent 3.0. I wondered if they might have done something strange, and maybe if I was running 3.0 then that seed would start feeding me.

Answer: no. So there wasn't any reason to stay with it, and I retreated to 2.2.1.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 07:26 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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