Distribution on trackers, where it is difficult to distribute, or how to defeat a sidboxer

As you know, some torrent trackers have a so-called rating. 5 years ago, when unlimited Internet just appeared in most cities of Russia, and its speeds were very low, the rating on some trackers was very difficult to maintain. What is there to support, even at least something difficult to distribute. And then, in search of rare music, I got to just such a tracker.

My channel was 512/512 kilobits / s (symmetrical). I almost immediately discovered that on other people's distributions with such a channel there was little that could be distributed. Or rather, almost nothing. Of course, it was possible to start creating my own distributions, but I decided to find out if it was possible to do something with strangers. It turned out that it is even possible.
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Although many years have passed, I still encounter reports of difficulties with the rating, and I personally know several people who still do not dare to download anything from this tracker, for fear that it will not work to distribute anything. Therefore, I think this information will be useful. The above screenshots and graphics were made not 5 years ago, but now, in order to schematically show the events that took place then.

Naturally, with a slow channel, you cannot download several hands at once, only one. But even if the distribution is not led by a sidbox , for example, a person with a “only” channel of 1-2 megabits, the next picture is obtained - those who download very quickly distribute what they have already downloaded from Sid, this stream easily fills my entire channel, and I sit gives nothing. Accordingly, I do not distribute anything.



It can be seen that the segments that everyone already has are swinging (in the screenshot, availability = 20).

Then I tried to find slow distributions. In order not to connect to everyone in a row, and then quickly disconnect when it becomes clear that there is nothing to catch, I found this way: watch the fresh distributions, and if we see that the seed is one and the leaders are several, moreover, the distribution goes for 1-2 hours , but they have not downloaded it yet, it means that the seed distributes slowly, and then you can win something. Usually this happens with fairly large hands, flags , and better multi-disk - the larger the volume, the more room for maneuvers (more on that later).

It turned out that even if a seed has an extremely low speed (for example, as I have, 60kbyte / s), there is nothing to catch in the hand anyway. Because by the time I connect to it, the leechers have already downloaded something, they immediately start distributing it to me, and it turns out again the same picture. Even if I manage to “catch up” with them (and this is not easy), the seed starts giving me something, the leaders very soon have new pieces, and they actively “push” them to me, immediately filling the channel, and everything repeats again. Thus, in order to distribute something, it is necessary that the distribution speed was 2 times less than mine, that is, about 30kbyte / s. And this happens on this tracker is extremely rare.

However, there is a way out. You can download only part of the songs from the distribution, for example, only one. This was not prohibited by the rules of this particular tracker. And that's how the process looks. We find the distribution (see above), let's say this is a 500M flask, out of 10 songs, it has been downloading for 1 hour and downloaded by 30% - a typical picture. I'm starting to download one song. The first time I “catch up” with other leechers, the whole stream comes from them, the distribution is zero. Since I download only one song, I quickly download everything that they have from it (a third of a 50M song is 17M, downloaded in 5 minutes). After that, there should usually be a lull, since the personalities have nothing more to give me, and the sit while “noticing” me. This usually lasts a few minutes, but sometimes longer. Sometimes it happens that the seed doesn’t "see" me at all, apparently completely fascinated by other personalities, but this happens rarely.

So, now seed begins to give me a little bit of the first piece. This is slow, because, for example, if its upload speed is 80kbytes / s, and only 6 leechers, then everyone gets 13kbytes / s. Sooner or later the piece comes, and (oh, a miracle!) All the other 6 leechers (usually sidboxes) pounce on him. And they pounce at the same time, ideally taking away each piece entirely, that is - I downloaded 1MB from a SID, distributed 6MB. In practice, this is not always the case, they still have different speeds, and sometimes some have time to merge my piece earlier and distribute it to others. And also we don’t forget that even though I download only 1 song out of 10, others also download it. And when they download a piece from “my” song, they immediately give it to me, which often causes Sid to be “confused,” and for some time he stops distributing to me again.

The traffic graph looks like this:



Here, incoming traffic is shown in red: narrow impulses are visible - segments that come from time to time from other peers, and slowly but constantly coming data from a seid. Distribution is shown in green: periodically leaving segments simultaneously to all peers merge into wide outgoing traffic pulses.

In general, in the end, after 2 hours of distribution, it comes to an end, everyone downloads the album completely, and I - one song, with 50MB down, and from 50 to 200MB up, the average rating for each distribution is about 2. At the same time it is necessary to take into account that the speed of distribution can also change: both increase and fall, while it is desirable to respond adequately. If we see that our only song is coming to an end, and the rest have not yet downloaded everything, you can add a second, third, etc. However, one should not forget, it is only necessary to slightly exceed a certain invisible threshold (“ordering” too many songs), as the pieces coming from other leechers slaughter everything and the return sharply drops to zero.

The graph above is valid for the case when the speed of the channel is much less than mine. If its speed is higher, or I “order” more songs for downloading, there will be more red pulses, and if they start to block my entire channel, the green recoil pulses will almost disappear:



Then we look for the next distribution and everything repeats again. Persistent experiments allowed me to learn how to choose precisely not only the number of songs, but also which songs to download, based on their size, in order to fill the outgoing channel completely. Of course, not on any hand, you can achieve this, but having enough experience and knowing all the parameters (speed of distribution, its size, size of pieces, speed and “behavior” of each feast), you can achieve this sensitive balance when another piece coming from Sid It is distributed to evil sidboxes, and while it is distributed to them, the next one comes from Sid, and so on and so forth, and by the end of the distribution, I just have time to get my 1-2 songs of the right size, after downloading at least a megabyte, and distributing at this is the maximum that could be squeezed out. But for this you actually need not to move away from the screen, all the time, constantly watching the process and controlling it when it is required.

Of course, there are still different nuances, such as peers with the libtorrent client (who tend to download the distribution from left to right), and you need to choose songs that they haven’t “covered” yet, but rather with the expectation that they will come to them later.



Here you can clearly see the continuous area that the sidebox shakes with libtorrent, and the other parts of the torrent are downloaded by other, “normal” clients in a random order. And sometimes other cunning people come across who also download only one song. In this case, you should try to choose not what they swing. It should be remembered that the sorting of songs within a torrent can be as consistent as random (this is determined by the author of the distribution when creating a torrent). So, for example, from the above figure we can conclude that the sidbox most likely downloads song number 9 or 10. So it’s necessary to start with song 8. If the arrangement of files is random, then this can only be determined by experience.

And from time to time among the distributions there come across “the best distributions” - where there are no Sydboxes. Since all the time I was pumping only slow distributions, I sooner or later got on those. And here the real holiday begins. On such a distribution, while it is still going, you can download a lot of songs, and sometimes the entire album as a whole. And it even happens that in general everything goes "in plus", that is, the seed gives out only to me, and I calmly hand it over to the rest, even slower than me, to the lechers. Well, the subsequent distribution in this case is also very productive, in contrast to the distribution with sidboxes, which, as you know, only they distribute.

Approximately in 10 days, examining the subtleties of the peer-to-peer exchange, I distributed 20 gigabytes, and at the same time I received 1-2 songs from albums of the most different styles, which I probably would never have learned, and then calmly got those that I liked. . It is not necessary, as described above, to try to squeeze the maximum out of each torrent, it is enough to distribute at least a little. And then in combination with the usual tips for any trackers (stay on hand, create your own, etc.) with time you can achieve good results.

ps I remind you that this is an article about trackers, where it is difficult to distribute, where the usual methods of maintaining a rating do not help.