Impact of increasing max peers for a download

[pjd813]

If I'm downloading a torrent that says there are 5000 peers what is the expected impact of raising my usual peer limit of 60 to 200? Since the effects of adjusting parameters in Transmission are not as straightforward as it might seem sometimes I'd like to pose this question.

Thanks,

Pete D.

[blacke4dawn]

That depends on your router (and maybe even your ISP), more specifically how many active connections it can handle simultaneously. The simplest answer I can give now is that if you raise the peer limit too high it will "choke" the router.

[Vallimar]

Keep in mind also there is a per-torrent limit and a global limit. If you aren't making heavy use of your
network, then 200 shouldn't be a problem on a few torrents. Just remember that if your global limit is
small and you set 1 or 2 torrents with a high limit, you could potentially starve other torrents of peer
connections.

For me, I have a global of 1000 and per-torrent defaulted to 150. I will occasionally raise that limit on
torrents I want to try to complete faster if the speed is lower than I think it should be.

You aren't going to hurt much of anything by fiddling, so play around and find something that makes you happy.
The worse that will happen is you set it too high and impact your own speeds, so just don't go banana's.

[pjd813]

Those are great responses - thanks for the input!

How do I find out how many streams my router can handle. Is that a trial and error thing or is there a spec I can investigate?

The global and per torrent limits do seem to be effective at impacting download speeds most of the time. This weekend I noticed that no matter how high I set the torrent limit that if there are 3 times as many leechers as seeders I'm lucky if I get more than a trickle of data.

Thanks again!