Last week or so strange behavior.

[mykill100]

Windows 7 64 bit 30mb broadband cable, windows firewall, AVG, port forwarded on netgear virgin superhub I'm using bitcomet 7.0 and have done for years without problems. Now if I go to a torrent on any site say TPB and choose a popular torrent with 600 seeders and 5000 leechers with a 1 GB file. Normally the file would be down in an hour but now even though the leeches are showing, only around 4 to 10 seeders will show and my download rate as crashed to around 1kbs-20kbs from 1800kbs. I added more trackers and connected DHT but no luck, so in over a week I've not been able to get a single torrent. Is anyone else experiencing this because I've checked all my settings and I'm getting remote connections. Its like just a few seeders are being allowed through, dont know how that can happen but it seems to have. Anyone else experiencing this I've noticed a couple of posts about losing seeds but I'm not sure if its the same thing. I cant see why these torrents are showing many hundreds of seeds yet only showing a few in the client and I'm talking about trusted torrents with good comments from trusted uploaders. Its just got me baffled.

Edited July 1, 2011 by mykill100 (see edit history)

[kluelos]

I'm using bitcomet 7.0 and have done for years

Eh, no, you haven't. The newest release version is 1.28. I'm assuming you mean 0.70, which is still rock-solid. There have been no significant changes to the bittorrent protocol since then, so it's still a good choice that a lot of people depend on.

It makes no difference what the index site claims the swarm consist is. That information is always out of date, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a whole lot -- days, weeks, months. All that matters is what the consist is *right now*, and your client tells you that. It gets the information from the trackers it successfully scrapes, plus the peers it finds via DHT and PEX.

The Pirate Bay doesn't even run a tracker anymore. They shut theirs down a couple of years ago. Public trackers allow any url and start tracking it when the first client scrapes. It's not openly stated where TPB gets its counts now, or how often it does so. Some index sites have a function to re-check, which gets the tracker's present count of the swarm. TBP never has.

What you get is the total of what the trackers and DHT/PEX say is currently out there. Now if a particular tracker is down or has a problem, it will say so in the trackers tab -- but most torrents on multiple trackers are multiply-listed. So if we can get together on, say, sumotracker, we will probably also get together on, say, tracker.ccc.de and if one of them is down, we still get counted on the other. You and I probably have the same list of trackers for the same torrent, so your IP address is reported in my contact list by all of them, and by DHT as well.

Because of this, your client is "the guy who should know", the authoritative answer to "how many seeds are in the swarm?". Everybody else is wrong and out of date.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

I'll add that even though version .70 is very stable, and can download as well as any of the competition, our more recent versions will allow connections from peers of networks outside the bittorrent swarm. BitComets own LTseed network has become very popular and can greatly increase the download speed on tasks with significant LTseed resources, even completing unseeded tasks in some cases, so you can in turn seed them to the bittorrent swarm. Our emule plugin also allows connections to the edonkey (ed2k) network that is still a popular filesharing network.

In some cases it can even download from peers of a different torrent with some or all of the same content.

If you want to try the new client without removing or changing your current version, you can download the .zip version from the link in my signature, extract and run it.

Just don't attempt to run two versions at the same time.