@chainyank said in Seeding rarely works in qBittorrent:
Given that I'm using qBittorrent, what else can I try?
...another client?
I am the person who wrote the tutorial you mentioned, it only optimizes your client to prioritize seeding, it has absolutely no impact on other peers' ability of contacting your client.
How peers are able to contact each other is affected by various factors, including bandwidth, geographical proximity, client choking algorithms, port forwarding rules, user firewall, ISP firewall, etc.
When is it an issue
In some cases ISPs will rely on CGNAT to save costs, that is, multiple clients share one single public IP address. That can make peers unable to establish inbound connections, even if you set port forwarding connections properly. In this case you don't have a public IP that others can reach directly, the IP that the tracker "casts" to other peers as being yours, is the CGNAT IP. So when you start an outbound connection with peers, they are able to connect, but if it is the peer initiating the connection, the request is purged by the CGNAT IP, because your ISP has no way of knowing to which of their clients the request was made. One way to mitigate this shared public IP issue is by using a VPN that offers dedicated IP, making your PC directly reacheable for incoming peer requests.
When it is NOT an issue
No one wants to be negative, everyone is seeding and being mindful of what to leech. The outcome is: torrents will always have way more seeders than leechers. There's nothing you can do if there is too few people requesting the torrent pieces, and more often than not there will be no leecher at all.
Also, have in mind that when you start a torrent, you will see a list of peers connecting immediately. They are not neccessarily leechers! Your client prompts a connection to the tracker, and the tracker proceeds to connect you with other peers, for various reasons like checking the swarm health, or trying "optimistic" connections to see if those peers are responsive. Since no one is missing any piece, the connections are dropped.
There are very few settings you can tweak in your client that will effectively impact peer affinity. Fixed Upload Slots will make sure that your client is able to upload to a predetermined maximum number of peers. Setting it to Upload Rate Based, on the other hand, reduces the number of available slots based on your current available bandwidth, so your client might reject peer requests.
Same thing for Choking Algorithm, both Round-Robin and Anti-Leech actively denies peer requests based on peer behavior. Setting it to "Fastest Upload" will ensure that you'll always upload to the peer with the best bandwidth, regardless of other conditions.
None of these settings will make you have priority over othe seeders in the swarm, though. When you download a torrent that already has a high number of seeders, you are wasting your ratio, you're extremely unlikely to seed it enough to reach 1.0 and recover the amount you downloaded, let alone go beyond 1.0 and start "profiting". The only way to ensure that new seeders with lower ratio are "prioritized" in the swarm would be by creating a new tracker algorithm.
Start uploading and only download huge torrents if they are freeleech, that's the only way of increasing your ratio.
