Is there any downside to leaving something seeding indefinitely? Typically I just leave all my torrents seeding whenever I’m done 24/7 (whenever the VPN is on) but is there any detrimental issues to seeding too much?

It doesn’t bother me I was just curious if there was ever a such thing as too much seeding since I have like 20+ things seeding and maybe one thing downloading.

Speed isn’t an issue since I have gigabit internet.

  • Taleya@aussie.zone
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    4 days ago

    Bless you.

    I deliberately leave stuff that’s been a bastard to get seeding as long as physically possible. We’ve all felt the pain. Don’t spread it.

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
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      3 days ago

      Exactly. There’s little point in keep seeding popular torrents on public trackers (it’s a different story for private trackers though).

      But if you have a rare torrent that has been difficult to complete, please please keep seeding it for as much as possible!

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    5 days ago

    There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

    Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

    (I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 days ago

    Lots of permaseeders out there, you can be one too :)

    There’s no real downside as long as your ISP doesn’t limit your bandwidth.

  • butter@midwest.social
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    5 days ago

    This is especially useful for Books. Small torrents are so hard to find. I perma seed books/audiobooks and copy to my slskd directory because they’re so hard.

  • nrabulinski@beehaw.org
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    5 days ago

    There’s wear and tear on your drives and your bandwidth usage, but if you meant from the tracker’s perspective - none, in fact the more the better

    • JackAttack@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      Is the wear and tear a considerable amount over time? Or just something to consider as it does some compared to not seeding 24/7?

      • black0ut@pawb.social
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        5 days ago

        Not really, at least not because of the data access. Drives mainly die because of their age.
        SSDs will basically not degrade by reading them, they only degrade when you write to them.
        HDDs can get degraded because of data access, but most HDD deaths are caused by bearing failures or head crashes, which are more of a matter of power-on hours.

        What all of this means is that if you already kept your device on 24/7, your drives aren’t gonna degrade noticeably faster by having your torrent client accessing them all the time.

      • tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
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        5 days ago

        Drive failures have almost nothing to do with access if they are mechanical. Most failures are from bearing or solder interconnect failures over time.

        Also, most seeding is in smaller chunks that are read and cached if popular… Meaning less drive hits than 1-1 read vs upload.

        You will almost always have drives fail from other aspects like heat or power or old age before wear from seeding would ever be enough to matter.

        I have drives in the excess of 10+ years, with several seeds that have been active for many years of those, that are still running just fine.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    Seeding some torrents since 2022. So no.
    Only for your bandwidth though. Make sure to set bandwidth caps for either trackers or timeslots (e.g. evening for gaming time)

  • dmention7@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    I have around 400 items seeding 24/7. No problems at all, except that I am sending from my media server via my desktop,so I need to set speed limits in my torrent client to keep from saturating the wifi connection. (Slowly working to get things migrated over…)

  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    maybe if its extreme gluck porn with lots of dicks you will hit your bandwidth limit for the month and so all other torrents will stop seeding until the next billing cycle

  • kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    I seed content I get as much as I can to I2P. No data caps here so not really any downside. You do have to limit stuff a bit to not overwhelm your connection at some point

  • Xanza@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    Depends on how many torrents you have. You have a set number of global peers. So if all of those peer slots are occupied by leechers, then you won’t have any room to download anything. A way around this is torrent priorities.

    Setting seeding torrents to low priority will ensure that any new torrents imported at normal priority will download without an issue. You can even set seeding torrents to high priority to ensure that they’ll always seed, even if it means taking priority over your downloads.

      • Xanza@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        You also know that if it’s set to high, it will overload the switch? Increasing it without thinking isn’t smart.

        You need to have an appropriately set number of global peers. You can’t just “HAHA NUMBER UP!” just for the hell of it…

        • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
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          4 days ago

          You can if you don’t run anemic networking gear. Have three PCs running torrent apps, with a total number of allowed connections sitting at right around 1200 between all of the torrent clients. Zero issues.

          • Xanza@lemm.ee
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            4 days ago

            You’re not having issues because it’s very likely it’s limited by your ISP regardless. There’s simply no way a consumer ISP (or VPN) is allowing 1200 simultaneous UDP connections. So you could likely set it to a million and have no issues. Because you’re being limited to ~250-500 at the protocol level by your ISP/VPN. lol

            Situations like this, torrent priority is even more important because there’s a high likelihood you’re not able to connect to peers you otherwise would be able to if you were using priorities…

  • RiQuY@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    If your router is the one that your ISP provided, torrenting can affect your internet connection stability by having too many connections active, because most of the time that hardware is trash (at least from my experience).

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 days ago

      Most (all?) torrent clients support limiting the number of active connections. This should prevent your router from being overloaded.

      In my experience 500 shouldn’t be a problem. On that note, limiting upload bandwidth to something less than the available upload bandwidth is important too.

      • black0ut@pawb.social
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        5 days ago

        250 active connections is the limit with my ISP provided router. You can get beyond that, but it causes a lot of instability, and eventually, the network fails and the router reboots.

        On another note, I don’t limit my bandwidth at all and I’ve managed to get uploads/downloads of up to 142% the speed which I should get.

        • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 days ago

          250 connections really is not much. I ran a matrix server for a while and joining a few large rooms (1k+ servers) made the connections reach a few thousand – which made the router slow down/unstable/reboot.

          I’ve noticed the same for my upload bandwitdh, with it being 170%-200% of its advertised maximum speed. Sadly the same can’t be said about the download bandwidth. Luckily fiber will be available in a few months.

          • black0ut@pawb.social
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            4 days ago

            Yeah I know I should, and it’s on my list, but I haven’t changed it yet lol. I’m making it work like this and if I can stretch it until they replace it for a more capable model, that’s money that I don’t have to spend on it.

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      5 days ago

      Hm, interesting. I didn’t bother with a personal router for the longest time (aside from an old Linksys I got because it works with ExpressVPN) because I have fibre optic but I might go out and look for one now.

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    5 days ago

    I generally keep things seeding indefinitely when I keep the content, to make the network stronger. For other things I delete it once it surpasses at least 1.0 ratio.

    The only real downside to seeding indefinitely is that you have to store it, but I would be storing what I do that for anyway.