Newbie Kinda

[gardenergirl24]

I have been using bit comet for years and would finally like to be able to completely understand how this works. I am able to download no problem and gone over and over my settings and they seem to be in order. I don't want to look like a leech and try to share my files after every download is complete. Recently it doesn't appear that my completed downloads are uploading/seeding. There is no upload progress at all and it show 0kb for an upload speed. I have made sure that the firewall is set to allow bit comet as well. I don't understand much about how the connections should be set to allow for seeding. I have seeded in the past so not sure what the problem is. I have all green lights too. Do I have to be seeding for a while before the upload speed will kick in? Can someone help me with this?

Edited June 9, 2012 by gardenergirl24 (see edit history)

[greywizard]

1. The first and most important thing is that you have an open listening port (which you seem to have, as per your description which reports green lights in the lower right corner for your incoming port).

That way other peers will be able to contact your client.

2. You should make sure that your upload global speed is capped to about 80% of your tested upload speed of your connection, so that your client and other application have some free upload bandwidth for protocol overhead and data requests (a.k.a. control traffic). Else your client will choke itself to a halt in a repetitive manner. If you didn't do that yet, go to the Guides section and follow the BitComet Settings guide.

3. Depending on your set upload speed in your client, make sure that each uploading (seeding) task has at least a bare minimum of 10KB/s bandwidth share (this might not apply when seeding multiple torrents for private trackers, where real upload activity is sparse and rare, and most of the upload credit comes from "seeding time" and less from "seeding ratio"; in that case you may run many torrents at once, since most of the time the tracker just counts your "up time" for each task and you will rarely have any peers requesting data for one or two of them). But for public torrents this rule counts, since most of them see constant activity, and if you can't provide a minimum decent upload speed for each of the ones you seed, most of the time the peers will seek other faster uploaders, unless you're one among very few uploaders and all of you have slow upload speeds.

4. Last but not least, you need to leave the task running after it finishes downloading in order to seed (a seeding task will be displayed with an upward red arrow icon).

P.S. All the above are sufficient assuming that you didn't change any other advanced settings inside the client.

If you already fulfill all of the above conditions and you still don't see any activity on your tasks, then it may mean that there are no interested peers which want to download from you (either there are much faster uploaders in the swarm and they saturate the bandwidth of the downloading peers or there aren't any interested peers at all). You can usually see the number of seeds/peers in the swarm in the Task List area of your client (just note that in the last versions of BC this number is not entirely accurate due to a bug which will need to be solved in a further release).

If you leave your tasks running during several days and there is still no activity, then it will be up to you to decide if you still want to make that specific content available (should anyone search for it at a later moment and join the swarm) depending on a torrent-by-torrent basis.