this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Feels very redditty, which is why I'm asking...

Also, what are total buffer size (what does it affect) and session waste (what does it affect)? qbittorrent-nox on Linux.

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[–] black0ut@pawb.social 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's a bit redditty, and a bit spammy, but I think it's healthy every once in a while. It may encourage seeders to get bigger numbers in a sort of healthy competition, which also benefits the swarm. Someone could do an annual stat sharing post or something, to keep the tradition going but also contained for those who don't like it.

Anyways, here are my stats:

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 month ago

That's a really healthy take on the matter! Nice! Yeah, the point is more mutual encouragement, exchanging of tips and tricks, rather than competition. In this economy, people shouldn't have to feel down because of hardware limitations.

Thanks for sharing! I promise, I won't ask again for a year. 🤣

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Idk about the buffer size, but the waste is basically when a part of the file you’re downloading gets lost/corrupted so you have to download it twice

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 10 points 1 month ago

It can also waste some data when a peer disconnects in the middle of sending a block, causing your client to request the block again from zero. The part of the block that was previously received becomes wasted data.

Additionally, near the end of the download, if a peer is transferring a block really slowly, your client might request it again to a faster peer, causing a bit of waste too.

[–] Daxter101@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 month ago (4 children)

How do y'all download tens of terabytes damn, what kind of 4k are you downloading, and for how many years, holy shit

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The download isn't just payload download, it includes the overhead. Even if you only upload, a bit of overhead is always counting towards your download. In practice, this means that the maximum possible ratio you can have is around 32 (meaning, for 32 units uploaded, there's 1 unit of overhead downloaded). With huge upload sizes, that overhead starts to become relevant.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This was new to me. Is there more overhead in these torrenting packets than, say, "normal" TCP/UDP traffic? Or do we just not count up/down ratios on normal traffic and we actually do have the same overhead there? I suppose with overhead, we are referring to all the data that is not the actual data portion of the packets, such as the IP/TCP headers?

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 6 points 1 month ago

I'm not actually an expert on the matter, and there is probably someone who knows more.

There are 2 protocols that qbittorrent uses for data sharing. The oldest one is basic TCP, with the same overhead. The "newer" (it's already quite old, too) protocol is µTP. It was specifically designed for p2p purposes, specifically torrents. µTP is, among other things, designed to coexist with other traffic without slowing it down. For this purpose, its packet size is variable. On very small packets, the overhead is big, while on larger packets it's small. I don't know how different the average overhead is between the 2 protocols, since those variable packets were designed for shared ADSL. Modern broadband probably allows µTP to use bigger packets most of the time.

From what I can gather, encryption also adds overhead to the traffic.

This is, however, not the main source of overhead (I don't even know if that overhead is really counted, I'd have to look more into it). The main source of overhead is actually control traffic (and that's the reason why you get download even when only uploading). Peers constantly communicate with each other to form the swarm, and they need to request blocks and announce which blocks they have. As far as I understand, this is the main source of the overhead, and it's independent from the protocol. Your client will announce to other peers what pieces it has, and its capabilities.

I also don't know if tracker traffic is included in the count. Your client sends a status to trackers every n minutes, which are specified by the tracker. Those are called announces. Most trackers have announce times between 30 minutes and 1h. If you have 500 torrents, with an average of 5 trackers per torrent and an average announce time of 45 minutes, you're sending ~3.3k announces per hour. They don't take much, but they add up.

DHT and PeX traffic could also be counted, but as with trackers, I don't know if it is.

If you start trying to get higher and higher ratios, you'll notice there's an asymptotic curve the higher you go. It really seems impossible to get to 30. I once had a client lose its historical up/down data, and without any download, it stopped at a ratio of around 32. This may be the ratio between upload + upload overhead / download overhead (from the PoV of your client).

Now, while I don't have any proof and I don't know how qbittorrent counts overhead, I suspect all those overheads are counted at the same time. So you're basically stacking them. This is because of the traffic limiter. If you really want to limit traffic to 100mbps, ideally, you'd count every overhead. If you don't, you could end up with both an unpredictable amount of traffic, and a higher amount of it than 100mbps. If they already implemented a counter that considers all overhead (basically just counting raw packet data), it would make sense that they used it for the global traffic counter.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

How: lots of storage, good networking infrastructure, patience
What: anything that was originally recorded on and not just upscaled to 4K
Time: my current repertoire of 127 torrents I built in five-six years

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Have the popular stuff and you will be sharing.
Have a look at the size of each entry and multiply by the ratio:

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do not even TELL ME that's The Adventures of Maya the Bee 😍😍😍

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

Yep. Fully dubbed in german and in very decent quality :)

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[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

qbittorrent all time statistics showing 107 tib up, 17 tib down

and just for fun the top 5

top 5 torrents in qbt sorted by uploaded

[–] bier@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)
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[–] percent@infosec.pub 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mine is around 1.1. I don't use any trackers, so no obligations there. I seed just enough that I'm not a net negative on the network

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The whole concept of 🏴‍☠️ is that there are no rules, so don't you mind any of that! And it's not a competition! 1.1 is fabulous!!! 😊

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There are no rules.
But theres a code of honor that should be followed to some degree.

[–] LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

My ratio is awful because the tracker I usually use has a seeding rule of either a 1 ratio or 10 days seeding and after those 10 days I'm pretty much always on 0 upload.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago

Same. It's fucking annoying. I get wanting to vet people but the limits they start you with are a joke when there's not enough demand to actually build up the ratio they want.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Keep it seeding? 🤷
Or what is stopping you

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (6 children)

6 months x 0 upload is still zero upload. I permaseed most things but since I don't use a seedbox, I miss out on a lot of upload credit on new files since my home internet connection can't compete with a seedbox's upload credit. Luckily most trackers account for this and give you bonuses based on seed time so it doesnt really matter and having a mix of fast but short-lived seeders along with slower but long term seeders helps everyone.

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[–] LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My system moves and renames files rather than linking them so anything still seeding is taking up double the storage.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Then start hardlinking instead of moving.
(at least if it's the same storage volume)

[–] cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago
[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How many of these are Anna's archive chunks?

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 month ago

Haha, I wish... If I was a bazillionaire, I'd backup the whole damn thing. 😥

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I haven't measured my leech/seed ratio anywhere since waffles.fm went away but whatever I had on there I was damn proud of

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I was not prepared to read something this... Emotionally charged/heartbreaking?

https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/dswbt6/rip_waffles/

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

yeah it was a really great private tracker! I put a lot of effort into making a few rips that earned a "golden waffle" badge on them, meaning I followed their super specific procedure for ripping that included a log demonstrating it was a perfect operation. not to mention having a great seed ratio!

was such an awesome tracker for audiophiles. lots of torrents, great seeding culture, great quality all around.

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[–] rektstarsceosu@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago

it ain't much but it's honest work

[–] 5PACEBAR@piefed.ca 3 points 1 month ago
[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

16.7... Rookie number, gotta pump that up

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not a competition! We do what we can at our own pace! Thanks for sharing! 😊

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[–] sixty@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I only have 2, Gluetun is a damn bitch

[–] beegnyoshi@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

what is the problem with gluetun?

[–] sixty@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Firewalls QB constantly. My monkey brain has been trying to fix it for 7 months 😵

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

Its likely because your VPN is disconnecting and qbit isnt getting restarted when it happens so it just sits there without being able to connect. Adding deunhealth to your stack and having it monitor qbit can help

[–] almost1337@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

I had good a good ratio back in the demonoid days, but nowadays I prefer usenet as my primary and set qb to stop seeding at 2.

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