What's even worse is when a torrent is stalled at around 94%, there's exactly one seeder with a full copy in the peer list, but he has fucked up networking rules (or an intentionally choked upload because he's a dirty leecher) so that despite having an open connection in the peer list, they never send any data...
anything under about 20kb/s is pretty much dead on the larger torrents.... a lot of people will turn down their upload limits so that protocol traffic can pass but actual pieces never get sent. It's irritating to say the least.
This seems to happen alot. I always wondered if it is really a peer or some weird spoofed peer that just tries to give you hope before crushing your dreams.
i had a similar one, godawful speed (i don't remember how much, but it was measured in single or double digit kbit/s) and turned on their computer when i went to bed, and off exactly when i came back from work.
ended up leaving the computer on the whole day for a few days. this guy owes me 5 bucks.
If he's the single seed left on a torrent, chances are he's the last seed on a bunch of other torrents as well, and his bandwidth is being choked by everyone who wants his stuff.
Wouldn't torrents be able to solve that issue because everyone is sharing with everyone else?
The last peer might only have 10kbps upload but as long as the other peers are sharing with one another everyone can pull down 10kbps because that is how fast new data is getting sent to the swarm.
Seeds fall off quickly on public trackers and the people who do long-term seeding on publics tend to end up seeding larger libraries. So you'll often be the one person in the world seeding a large number of torrents. Multiple leeches is only a theoretical help because when it finally seeds out, half the people quit immediately, some hang around to seed to the last leechers, and a couple hang around for a week or two before feeling they've done their due diligence and signing off. Things are quiet on that torrent for a month or so, and then a new leech shows up and the whole thing repeats again. It's why I stopped seeding on publics: it's extremely demoralizing to finally get copies of something out to the dozen or so people who have accumulated, only for every one of them to fuck off right after they finish.