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Downloading
This is a common question and there is no simple answer as many things can influence your upload and download rates.
The first thing to do is evaluate the health of the swarm. A healthy swarm will have a number of seeds that have the complete download and are available to send you data. Depending on your download it will probably have one or more trackers, these can be seed in the "sources" sub-tab for the download. It may also use decentralised trackers (the built in BiglyBT tracker, the "mainline DHT" tracker if you have this installed and the I2P tracker if the download uses this network). Check the "seeds" column to see how many seeds each source is reporting. Note that the values reported aren't guaranteed to be accurate but it is a good starting point.
If the swarm has zero or a low number of seeds then there are few potential sources of the data you want to download.
You can see the actual seeds you are connected to by checking the "peers" sub-tab.
If the "peers" sub-tab shows attempted to connections (indicated by a state of "connecting") that disappear after a while then this generally means that the peers are no longer available - this is quite common.
Even when there are seeds available if there are a large number of peers (also known as "leechers") attempting to also download then your download may be slow. This is because the seeds' upload bandwidth is spread across all the downloading peers. For example if there are 10 seeds and 100 peers then each seed's upload is shared across 10 peers.
Often when a popular download becomes available for the first time this will be the case.
Even when you are connected to a seed it won't necessarily upload to you. This is because bittorrent uses the concept of "upload slots". A given seed will only upload to a relatively small number of peers at a time to avoid spreading its upload bandwith too thinly - it uses a limited number of upload slots to achieve this. Periodically it will re-allocate the slots to different peers. When you have been allocated a slot you have been "unchoked" by the peer. When you don't have a slot you are "choked". There is a column in the "peers" sub-tab that shows your "choked" status (note this is different from the "choking" column. The choking column shows other side of things - whether or not you have allocated a slot to the peer in order to upload to it). Once you are unchoked you can make requests for data to the peer - see the "out reqs" column.
If the download's swarm has a lot of other peers then don't expect a seed to upload to you at a high speed, it may well be uploading to other peers and have limited bandswidth available for you. Also you don't know what other downloads a seed is participating in, it may be uploading to many other swarms.
Users often save their download data to an external drive. If this is a USB device then this can be quite slow and impact the overall download speed. Also, due to buffering, you can end up with an unstable download rate that fluctuates between high and low values. One fix for this is to download to a local drive and then move the download to the external one when complete - see Options->Files->Completion Moving for an option to do this.
It is possible that you have set a download speed limit - check the current ones in force by going to Tools->Speed Limits->View Current...
Check that you aren't bound to the wrong/inactive network interface under "Options->Connection->Advanced Network Settings [Socket Options]: Bind to local IP address or interface" (note you have to set your "Mode" to Advanced to see these settings). If there's a value set there and you don't remember entering it then clear it. One way this can get set for you is if BiglyBT thinks you are running a VPN - if this is incorrect, or perhaps your VPN network interface has changed, this can result in an invalid binding being set.
Sometimes there can be fake peers in a swarm that are there to attempt to interfere with downloading/seeding. This can be evident if you have lots of peer connections but none of them are unchoking you or the ones that are unchoking you are not answering your requests for data. You can try to "kick-and-ban" peers that appear to be fake - right-click on them in the "peer" sub-tab for options.
Although this generally doesn't occur with a consistently slow download it can impact your overall download speed. Your upload is saturated when you are uploading at, or close to, your maximum upload bandwidth. When this happens it can interfere with your downloading as the necessary control messages to the remote peer are delayed. In general it is recommended that you cap your maximum upload speed to 80% of the maximum.
If you are a user that limits your upload bandwidth and stops seeding a download as soon as it completes then don't come moaning about slow download speeds, you are part of the problem.
Downloading rules can be used to automatically determine a torrent's position in the download queue. You can control downloading rules from Options->Queue->Downloading
If you have more than one torrent downloading then they are assigned positions in the download queue. Normally a new torrent will be added to the bottom of the queue although this can be changed when adding a torrent in the options dialog.
You can also re-organize the download queue by dragging and dropping torrents as required, or by right-clicking and selecting the 'reposition' option.
The maximum number of active downloads is defined in the Options->Queue - if you have more than this number of downloads the remainder will wait in a queued state until a slot becomes available (there are also options that permit stalled downloads not to be counted as active, so you may see extra downloads active in this case)
There are three options for ordering the downloads:
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Order Based This is the default, download priority is based on the order that you manually set for the downloads.
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Seed Count Based This option automatically orders the downloads based on the number of seeds (and peers if seed counts are equal) that each download has.
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Speed Based For the rules to be effective it is important that you set a global download limit within BiglyBT - right click on the download speed indicator on bottom right of the status bar or go to Tools->Options->Transfer to set this. If you don't know your download limit run a speed test. The reason this is important is that when a limit is in place BiglyBT can easily determine if your download speed is optimized and therefore that there is no point in attempting further adjustment. The adjustment process requires that the potential download speed of downloads be tested - this can cause a transitory decrease in overall download rate.
It is only worth enabling this option if you have a number of incomplete downloads in a queued state.
The following options influence behavior:
- Download speed evaluation period: the number of seconds that a download will be allowed to run for at the top of the queue to assess its potential download speed
- Re-evaluate downloads: the number of minutes to wait before re-evaluating a download's potential speed. Enter zero to disable this.
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