Is there any peer to seeds ratio that gives max download speed?

Question

I understand the terms seed and peers in context to bittorrent but while downloading a file what does 1(2) may be for seeds and 1(4) for peer represent ? What does it mean ?

The following pic shows this :

what does that mean ?

Also what does the download speed of torrent depend upon ? I want to know the ratio. i.e what should be the ratio of seeds and peers so that the download speed is max. ?

When will I get a better download speed : ?

• 2000 seeds + 5000 peers

• 2000 seeds + 2000 peers

• 5000 seeds + 2000 peers

Let me verify, a seed is the one that has 100% of the file and peer is the one that is both downloading and uploading the file.

Answer 1

"1 (2) seeds" means that you are connected to 1 out of 2 available seeds. Thus, "1 (4) peers" means you are connected to 1 out of 4 available peers.

There really isn't any "optimal" ratio of seeds/peers. You could max out your download bandwidth from one single seed, regardless of how many peers or leechers there are. In general, the more seeds, the better, as this gives you more places to connect to to download the file. So, yes, a torrent with 100 seeds may be slower than a torrent with 1000 seeds. It really depends on the upload speed of the seeds themselves.

A number of reasons could prevent you from connecting to all available seeds. Note that the numbers in parenthesis are the total number of seeds and peers as reported by the tracker, which may not be correct. Some of these seeds may not have their torrent clients open at the moment, or may have reached their maximum amount of connections, so that they are not able to connect to you.

Answer 2

You must also take into account the number of connections per torrent and the total connections your bit torrent client will allow. This is based on the upload speed you enter when you set up your client. For example I have an upload speed of 20 Megabits per second or 2.5 MB/s (Megabytes per Second).

My Vuze bit torrent client will Auto set me up with 130 connections per torrent, so as you can see 5000 seeds are not going to be allowed my Vuze to connect to me.

MY TOTAL number of connections over all active torrents is 1100, so again 5000 seeds can never connect. With the more common much lower UPLOAD speeds of 1.5 to 5 mbps far fewer connections per torrent and overall are allowed.

You have to remember as well that the total of 130 connection per torrent also includes peers who are trying to download the wanted torrent just like myself, they connect to me so we can share bits between each other. So not all 130 connections are seeds, some are fellow peers as well.

To further confuse matters fellow peers can often upload to you faster than some seeds. If you upload back to them you both may end up having a faster download experience if the current seeds are rather slow but there is a lot of them.

As a general rule you will achive faster download & upload speeds to your wanted torrent swarm if you only run ONE ACTIVE downloading torrent and stop all the rest. Most of today's slow download speeds are cause by PEERS and SEEDS running too many active torrents at the same time.

Answer 3

5000 seeds 2000 peers = more speed

seeds to peer ratio is more, the better speed you get :D

I hope that helped helped.. :)