Not connecting to any peers in ABC!

[JRiordan]

I am downloading Phish NYE 1995 Set 2 and 3 DVD (http://www.thetradersden.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8525&page=1&pp=15). My download began at around 40-50KB/s for a while, and a few minutes later I also started uploading at 40KB/s (my max upload on my cable line is about 44KB/s). Several hours later, speeds began to slow WAY down. My download progress is only 13.7%, download speed goes between 1.5KB/s and 2.5KB/s. My upload speed has been 0KB/s for most of the day.

I go to "torrent details" in ABC, and somehow I am not connected to any peers (of the 5 that are shown on the tracker)! I am connected to 3 seeds (of the 5 shown), but only receiving data (albeit at 2KB/s) from one of them. The other 2 show up and "choked" and "snubbed" in my "torrent details".

I do not understand why I am not sharing/receiving from any peers, not to mention the other 2 seeds.

This is a huge torrent (8.5GB), and there are not THAT many currently on it, however something must be wrong. I'm wondering if the BT algorithms are just not working right. The following info is taken from http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification :

"Anti-snubbing (extension not in the official protocol)

Occasionally a BitTorrent peer will be choked by all peers which it was formerly downloading from. In such cases it will usually continue to get poor download rates until the optimistic unchoke finds better peers. To mitigate this problem, when over a minute goes by without getting a single piece from a particular peer, BitTorrent assumes it is "snubbed" by that peer and doesn't upload to it except as an optimistic unchoke. This frequently results in more than one concurrent optimistic unchoke, (an exception to the exactly one optimistic unchoke rule mentioned above), which causes download rates to recover much more quickly when they falter."

The above seems to NOT be happening, i.e. I am stuck as snubbed by all peers for some reason, and not recovering to recieve any data from them or send to them.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? Besides the fact that the download is showing an ETA of over 5 weeks, I am pissed that I'm not uploading to others.

Note that this could just be a very bizarre, slowly crawling torrent, since I have downloaded plenty of shows from bt.etree.org and my downloads hit speeds of 200-300KB/s and consistent 40KB/s upload. Also, I downloaded Phish NYE 1995 Set 1 DVD (http://www.thetradersden.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8386&page=1) from tradersden, and achieved respectable speeds, and also uploaded until my ratio was 0.75, and all of that while running 2-3 other torrents from bt.etree. I do realize that multiple torrents running will hurt speeds, and I currently only have this ONE going, which I'm having so much trouble with.

I am running Nvidia firewall (Medium profile), no router. I don't think that is the problem, since as I just said, I have experienced great BT downloads from bt.etree, and my IP address does NOT show up as firewalled on the bt.etree tracker pages.

Please advise!

[JRiordan]

QUICK UPDATE:

Of course I did not think to do this until after typing the above post, but I just stopped the torrent, restarted my computer. Now I'm back on, connected to 4/5 seeds, and 2/6 peers, downloading 70KB/s and uploading to the peers around 28KB/s.

Maybe ABC just needed that "kick in the ass", in the form of a restart. Regardless, the problem described above shouldn't be happening... I still wonder if anyone has experienced that. Thanks.

Have to get some sleep -- hopefully when I check back, I'll still be connected to peers and downloading and uploading properly...

EDIT: download speeds jumped to about 120KB/s... nice!

[Ted]

Glad you got it working again. The NVIDIA firewall is somewhat new and I'm seeing a lot of people having issues with it. I'm not saying you will or that it is what caused your problem, but keep in mind that it "may" be the cause of problems until they get all of the bugs worked out.

Also, you can't really compare one torrent's download stats to another - no matter what the site. There are many variables that decide how a specific torrent will down/upload - the biggest one being the peers that are available in that particular swarm - how many seeds vs. leeches, their speed, and whether they're firewalled or not. In addition to that, if there is only one seed, and you happen to jump on towards the beginning of the seed, you'll experience good speeds for a while, then it may drop off while the others get their turn.

[Five]

restarting is a great trick to kickstart bt... glad you got it working.

[Horace]

I find in ABC when I seem to get snubbed that if I hit the "queue" button, it acts as a "refresh" button and goes through the torrent and reconnects to the tracker. I often get a better connection to the others on the torrent.

Horace