So a file I was needing is showing as 9 seeds, 5 peers, but its stalled.
Why is that? And what does it mean for me other than I can’t grab it. Is there something I can do on my end, or is it on the other side of things?
I’ve just cut the cord, so if these questions are basic, I apologize, I am just now learning a lot of this stuff
In qbit click on the stalled torrent and look for “last time seen complete” if it says “never” it means the file is dead. None of the seeders have the last bit of the file and the seeders are other people waiting for somebody to complete the file. If this happens just delete and restart from a different source.
Edit: This applies to files that have started downloading then stalled out later. If your download is still at 0% you have a separate issue.
Not all seeds are online 24/7. Sometimes leaving the torrent running for hours or days can allow you to download it when that PC/server gets switched on.
Right, but it wouldn’t show those people in the seed number. If it says there are 9 seeders, that means that 9 are actually online right now.
Yes, or at least 9 when the seed numbers were last checked, which shouldn’t change too quickly.
As for why seed numbers listed on trackers are significantly larger than those found by actual clients, who knows.
Okay but there are plenty of real-world reasons that you might not be able to download from those seeds.
- No spare bandwidth. Their bandwidth might be saturated on other peers, other torrents, or other applications entirely.
- Bandwidth limits. All torrent clients have ways to limit bandwidth. Most often have a UI button to switch between a high and low option. Some also have schedulers for that as well.
- Connection limits. All torrent clients have a maximum limit for open connections (ie peers) because large amounts can be very taxing on resources. There are also generally ‘upload slot’ limits too, further limiting those connections that can be used for seeding.
- ISP Port throttling. ISPs are constantly trying to block P2P traffic, the seed might need to change their port to become unblocked.
- Misconfigured UPnP/Port Forwarding/Firewall settings blocking the seed’s incoming connections, while it still reports to the tracker as this is an outgoing connection.
- Geographical distance can also make a huge difference.
- Public trackers amplify some of these issues more than private ones. Hence why you often see network configuration knowledge needed for interviews.
I have noticed that healthy torrents stall when the ISP closes the port I was using in the end. Several torrent clients have the option to check if the port is open or closed, and also another option to randomize the port at startup.
QBittorrent and Transmission have an option to anonymize or have the data encrypted, and that seems to make a difference for me when downloading using my employers ISP.
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“why pay for a vpn to hide my ip when I can just use an ip that isn’t mine” –that dude, probably
I have a VPN, and I checks for ipleak’s before I ever grab anything. I also have Qbit forced to go through my VPN. I am not sure how to do the Anonymous downloading
I will look into the tools section again
Does your VPN provider allow port forwarding? That’s probably the answer to this. Forward a port through the VPN provider and set the qBit listening port to the same.
The seeders and leechers number is pulled from trackers (I think?) but doesn’t accurately represent the numbers available to you unless you have port forwarding set up properly.
Edit: just my 2 cents if your provider doesn’t offer port forwarding, I use AirVPN and it’s excellent. Great speeds and it offers everything I need. My only complaint is that the website is confusing.
Vote 2 for the website being confusing… their forums remind me of the good old days of utter contempt at questions being asked 😏
Nah the website displayed “seed/leech” numbers can be outdated or fudged (1337x is notorious for this) but the number you see in Qbit will be accurate, however those 9 seeds you see are either people without the complete file or people who aren’t port forwarding because “you don’t need port forwarding for torrents” and you can’t connect to them.
Ah I see
I use SurfShark
I am not sure how to do the Anonymous downloading. I will look into the tools section again
It’s in the advanced section, if I remember right. https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/Anonymous-Mode
Depends on where you got the torrent, but those seeders might actually be just wrong reports by the tracker. It has happened to me as well. I’ve left torrents for months just to see if it will eventually start downloading… nope, just sitting there, idle.
Can’t say what the real reason behind this is, but my best guess is some bots are reporting wrong info via DHT and/or the trackers. Why? Have no idea, your guess is as good as mine 🤷.
I added in more trackers by finding the same file on few other servers, that seems to have resolved it for one of the files I need. But not the second one. First one should be done now in 57 minutes. The other is showing it DLing, but the ETA is infinity lol
Is it actually downloading or just saying it’s downloading? Like, is the there some trafic downstream?
the progress meter on File 1 is growing, so yes, but file 2 it shows the status change, and the down speed will max out at 304 B/s, then slowly taper off until it stalls, and then it spikes back up again.
I wish there was a YTS server but for TV shows, it would make this easier
How big is the spike? If it’s in hundreds of KB, yeah, chances are it really is downloading something. If it’s in bytes, it’s probably dead, those are just sync packets most probably.
YTS 🤨?
YTS is a new version of yify, which most people hate, but honestly for my fam, its fine.
RARBG is the go to for anything older than 1 year or so when they shut down.
Yeah, be careful relying on status messages from trackers, most are actually not that reliable and may misreport. Have had it happen on occasion as well.
Are there any easy ways to auto purge stalled torrents (either after a certain amount of time, or if they’ve never seen a complete copy after some time?) I have most of the *arr suite and use qbittorrent. I recently installed qbit_manage, but I’m not sure how to use it yet.
You can write a python script to interact with Qbittorrent as it has an API. I wrote one to delete stalled torrents and another one to set them to the lowest priority (so they don’t fill up the download queue). If anyone is interested im happy to share the code. Whichever one I chose just runs every 30 mins or so using windows task scheduler
I’d love to get a copy if you’d be willing to share it.
Sure, youll need to change the info at the top of the scripts for your qBitTorrent client:
Remove stalled torrents https://pastebin.com/embed_js/aTjh8LYm
Move Stalled torrents to low priority https://pastebin.com/embed_js/LxrXd07N
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Something that has happened to me is that I had set the network interface in qBit but the the interface that my VPN used had changed (disabled and enabled) and the interface in qBit didn’t actually exist anymore. Kind of a niche issue, but yeah.
