Transmission

OK, I searched for relevant info and help, but there doesn't seem to be anything regarding my particular issue with this function.

1) With most files, once Transmission starts transfers, it frequently leaves me with very few or zero connected peers or seeds out of a good pool size actually downloading to me. When I click on Ask Tracker For More Peers, it does nothing, never has. The number has never, ever increased even once.

2) Also frequently, when I look at the list of connected sources, many / most refuse to send to me, but certainly accept whatever I send. This is unfair, but I don't have a way of knowing why they refuse to send nor can I eliminate them from my pool.

Now, this doesn't always happen, so I figure my settings are OK, in general, but it happens often enough to cause me concern.

How do I resolve this so that my limited bandwidth doesn't get sucked up without some sort of balance and fairness?

1) Asking for more peers does mean "Ask for more peers willing to upload to me", it only means that you are asking for the total amount of peers in that swarm. The other peers needs to have a slot free for you to be able to connect to them. However, it could also be that the numbers are faked or incorrect in some way.

2) It may not be that they refuse to send data but rather that they can't, since the most likely reason is that you already have downloaded all they have to share.

Asking the tracker for more peers is a "manual announce" where you report to the tracker your upload/download totals and it responds with a list of peers for us to try. For example it might be the same peers it gave us last time, or it might be peers that aren't interesting... we users have no way of controlling which peers get sent in the list.

OK, then I must have misunderstood that "Ask tracker for More Peers" doesn't actually mean "Ask tracker for More Peers". How was I to know?

When there are literally thousands upon thousands of peers and seeds, each, I would expect more than two to connect, so, to me, it seemed to be a reasonable function and a reasonable request. I still can't figure this one out.

Ahh, I see now that I made an error in my previous post, the start of the first point should read: Asking for more peers does not mean "Ask for more peers willing to upload to me". That is the big difference, you are just asking for "more" peers, not specifically for those who are interested, willing or capable in uploading to you.

Another thing could also be that you already know of every peer that the tracker knows about, so asking for more won't actually give you more since there are no more to inform you about.

Know I'm necro'ing a thread here, but I feel like I have something to add to a pretty good conversation. Unfortunately, I don't think I can do it without a little storytelling ...

Once upon a time, when the P2P world was so new and all, things were moving quickly, and different ways of approaching the system were being born in that fog of history. At one point, there were these things called clusters. My understanding is that they're analogous to what people to refer to as swarms. With my vague notion of how it all works, they were a list of peers worth connecting to based on the number of stops on a traceroute and the overall time-to-live (TTL) between you and them, the idea being that if you had to bounce around the internet enough, you weren't going to have a stable connection or be able to download/upload, even if you could find what you wanted. At that time, if you were having trouble finding things in your own cluster, some clients would allow you to search in "nearby" clusters just to see if there were more sources. Now torrenting is a different animal, but not quite unlike the ones of the P2P age, and I've lived through so many changes, I get them all mixed up. When I look at a function to find more peers, I make a brash assumption, based on the hope that it's going to do some searching, rather than refresh a list. When I click on it, I've seen the number of connected peers go up by one or two on a rare occasion but, coincidence or not, it would only happen if my file already had a fair number of peers already.