[xavier242]

Originally Posted by zoso69

Many thanks Xavier. Do you happen to have one for BiglyBT?

According to this, it can do sequential (required to stream a torrent):
https://www.reddit.com/r/BiglyBT/com..._for_advanced/

Look in the program options or settings for enabling streaming (it might be called that instead of sequential downloading). It may be like qBittorrent where you can only set it in the download dialog (not globally for all torrents).

I did some more reading on sequential downloading and like I guessed, as long as some seeders remain, a new swarm remains healthy even if everyone downloads sequentially. I've not seen any torrent where everyone hits 'n runs (not that it doesn't ever happen).

Knowing this, I wonder why the default in most (or all) programs is to download pieces in random order? Seems quite strange given that the setting was (possibly) decided when spinning mechanical drives were king (SSDs don't care either way).

DH tells me his seedbox upload speeds are much faster since I posted the suggestion.

If you didn't read the uTorrent 2.2.1 tweak guide on Reddit, here's the TLDR:

Use a dedicated local (not network) drive for your uTorrent download folder. If you use a SSD, it may be ok to share with the operating system. But if uTorrent's GUI ever freezes, you must use a dedicated local spinning or SSD drive (USB 3.x external is fine). Don't use qBittorrent or uTorrent 3.x for downloading (both have major bugs).

from the uTorrent 2.2.1 Reddit post:

Sequential Transfers:
By default, bittorrent transfers are random pieces of the file(s). This is the worst possible load for spinning (older mechanical) drives. My spinning RAID6 array does 1600MBytes/sec for sequential transfers, but plummets to 2.5MBytes/sec for random transfers. Non-array spinning drives do better, maybe getting 10MBytes/sec. SSDs do about the the same speed for sequential or random.

When downloading from long-term seeder(s) that are using spinning drives, you will greatly reduce the load on the server drives and see higher speeds if you set uTorrent to transfer sequentially. This is a global setting affecting all transfers:

Have no torrents selected. Press and hold Shift and F2 simultaneously. Keep holding them down and click the Settings button.

These now appear in the Advanced settings list. Change to:
bt.sequential_download true
bt_sequential_files true