Rodo Abad

Alright, so I just discovered something today about rtorrent’s min_peers setting and I think everyone that uses rtorrent should know this since that setting could pretty much destroy you as a seeder.

Setting min_peers to ’0′ makes your rtorrent useless once you’re done seeding it ’0′ means that you’re telling rtorrent that it’s ok if you don’t find any peers…you don’t have to go out and look for them. So please set your min_peers to a high number if you want to seed!

Moreover, if min_peers is set to ’0′ and you have multiple trackers then rtorrent will never try and rotate through your trackers! Why? Because you just told rtorrent that it’s fine if there’s no peers to serve. So if tracker #1 has 0 peers to serve and tracker #2 has let’s say 100+ peers to serve then rtorrent will ignore the tracker #2 peers.

I use around 20+ trackers for each of my torrents and I have min_peers set to 1000. This makes rtorrent rotate all my trackers forever unless of course 1000 peers is reached which is unlikely considering that I’ve yet to break 100+ peers. Setting min_peers to a high number pretty much tells rtorrent to keep looking for people to serve – which is what you want if you just want to seed…seed…and seed.

I hope that helps because it sure did help me! Just take a look at the screenshot after setting min_peers with a high value.

If you have a better definition of min_peers for me and how it exactly works then I will appreciate it if you correct me especially if I’m wrong.

rtorrent ticket by P4rD0nM3 (That’s me).

Another rtorrent ticket that prompt me to change mine.

Oh and if you guys didn’t even bother to read the post above then here’s the summary.

• If min_peers = 0 then rtorrent won’t even bother trying to seed your torrent. This also means that it won’t rotate your trackers (trackers won’t be updated except for the first one)!
• If min_peers is set to a ridiculously high value then it will keep searching for people to serve until the value is met so set it to a really high value if you want to keep serving! This also means that rtorrent will rotate all your trackers forever (updating each and every single one of them).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 10:24 AM and is filed under GNU/Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.