October 05, 2008 by sharky
While there’s no officially announced freeleech coming up in the foreseeable future, we thought we’d get this to you now instead of sitting on it for months while it’s still fresh. During the last What.cd freeleech weekend, I managed to upload almost 150 GB without being overly aggressive about it. Here’s our personal collection of tips & tricks for how it’s done:
General Seeding Tips:
The tips in this section are specifically customized for freeleech; however, much of this is also applicable to general seeding during regular What.cd usage.
• Be Active, Be Aggressive: If you think that you’ll be able to just download a bunch of torrents and wake up the next day to a 100 GB buffer on your account, you’ll be sadly mistaken. To properly optimize a freeleech, you’ll need to constantly troll What.cd for the latest & most popular torrents (with other tips below) - and devote a good deal of your time towards it. Properly managing your seedbox and/or home BT client will also be crucial. Above all else, you’ll only get out of it what you put in.
• Get A Seedbox (even if it’s a temporary one - preferably an unlimited/unmetered one). In normal day-to-day use at What.cd, a seedbox doesn’t particularly make all that much of a difference - unless you assertively hit the new torrents. But for freeleech times, a seedbox is a necessity if you want to do heavy uploading to the influx of new leechers.
• Go For Torrents that have only one seeder and many leechers (1 - 20+). This is probably one of the most important tips of all. While you may not always be able to complete the torrent DL in the given freeleech period; however, you’ll be able to seed a huge amount to others who are waiting for the rest of it, just like you. Highly recommended for a seedbox, not always great for home computers. Some of the best upload stats I’ve had were from torrents that had just one seeder, with a gazillion leechers. While the torrent may never complete during the freeleech time, the total ‘upload’ more than made up for the DL cost, regardless whether the torrent completed "on time" or not. The screenshot below illustrates exactly how these torrents work in real time. Note that while all three have not completely downloaded, they’ve managed to upload much more than the total size (T. Down).
• Upload New Torrents, especially during freeleech. Set this all up beforehand; have your files and *.torrents ready to go well in advance. Other clever ratio-builders will always be looking for the latest additions. One trick is to limit your upload speed on a new torrent, so as to stay in the swarm (and, as the only source for missing data ‘packets’ that no one else has).
• Bookmark Torrents — Smart seeders will bookmark (or even download) torrents before the freeleech begins. When you know well in advance of an impending freeleech, look for torrents that will potentially do well - and bookmark them at What.cd so you won’t be scrambling to find them during the freeleech. (Also, as seen in the last FL due to high serverloads, What.cd imposed an 8 second limit between searching & page refreshing).
• Seed Seed Seed — Even once a freeleech ends, most leechers won’t delete their incompleted torrents, so there’s still a ton of upload to be had for the next few hours. This is particularly indicative with large packs, but not so much with smaller 1-album torrents. The general rule of thumb is: the larger the torrent, the longer it will seed after the freeleech is over.
• Always "Click In" — The stats on the browse page are not as accurate (i.e. - up to date) as when you click the "details" aka "download" page of a torrent. Clicking on the album title will result in fresher seed/peer statistics. A torrent that seems to be 2 - 50 (2 seeders to 50 leechers) may actually be 20-32 (or worse).
• Watch For New Uploads — Truth is, people upload a LOT during a freeleech - hey, it’s the best time to attract users to new torrents. Aside from arranging the torrents by S/L or L/S - be sure to browse the latest additions.
• Go Home — Check the What.cd "home" link from time to time. It’s a blog of sorts - staff will update tons of stuff here, such as adding additional freeleech time in the event of downtime, etc.
Seedbox Tips:
• Put Some Big Torrents In. If you have a seedbox with a big limit (50 GB and up). For this, select large torrents with many seeders and leechers (classical music ‘packs’ become extremely popular, such as "Ludwig Van Beethoven - Complete Beethoven" and "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - The Complete Mozart Edition") - but get in early (on the first day of freeleech) so you can’t get caught downloading the rest after it ends. Others that do very well are large "apps" such as "Rosetta Stone" and "Adobe" torrents. Browse the torrents, and arrange them accordingly. During freeleech, these will become mighty popular - although the caveat is that not all "leechers" are really what they seem (as some are just partial seeders). While you’ll may only upload 15 GB on a 30 GB torrent - that’s still 15 GB extra to your upload buffer! These are not a recommended torrent on a home PC (unless you ‘partially seed’), even if you have the drive space and decent UL speed, since your bandwidth and connectivity cannot compete with a superior seedbox. But with a seedbox at least you’ll be able to download it in full very quickly, while uploading as much as you can. Needless to say, obviously smaller torrents will also work well.
• Rotate Your Torrents — Here’s a tip that probably shouldn’t be mentioned: Presently, there are no official H&R rules at What.cd. Seriously! There’s no ‘minimum seed time’ or ‘minimum ratio’ per individual torrents (we asked, and had this confirmed). But this should not be taken as a carte blanche to download and kill torrents at your leisure - you may still get a warning, or worse. But it allows for some freedom in being able to remove torrents that aren’t seeding anymore, and replace them with fresh ones.
• Watch For The End Of Freeleech — This means, there’s no point in grabbing a massive 25GB torrent that looks ’statistically’ appealing, when there’s only hours left on the freeleech. If your seedbox can handle it, go for it. If not, you’ll get stuck downloading the rest (at a cost to your account) as most leechers were just partial seeders anyways, or they outright bailed on the torrent.
• Go For FLAC Torrents — FLAC torrents always seem to seed better than their MP3 (320, V0, V2) counterparts, especially so in a seedbox. The overall ’seed ratio’ may not be as high but the total UL will be better on FLAC. Why? Because smart What.cd members use a freeleech as a great opportunity to obtain FLAC files that would normally be costly to download, natch!
• Kill All Other Torrents — Not to be taken literally, but attempt to devote the entire seedbox to What.cd during a freeleech. While it’s still acceptable to seed torrents that don’t have many connections, you don’t want to be adding any popular 0day torrents from other trackers. These not only eat up bandwidth, but in/out connections as well, and increase the server load.
• Use the ‘Transmission’ BT Client — If you’re using TorrentFlux (b4rt preferably), then Transmission is the best way to go. Transmission uses much, much less memory than Mainline or BitTornado. No idea what we’re talking about? Us either - but these guys do. But to do it, go into the "Transfers Settings" of a torrent, and see if you can change the client. Not all TFlux providers allow for it, but some do. With cheap resellers, who knows? - if you own the server you should have no problem at all.
• Use Your Home BitTorrent Client — Probably don’t have to tell you this: cover all the seeding angles. I used two home computers and two seedboxes over the last freeleech. Don’t forget about home seeding - it adds up.
Home BitTorrent Seeding Tips:
No Seedbox? — No Problem! This is OK, you can still make a huge improvement in your upload buffer if careful about selecting the right torrents. A seedbox is much more giving in a freeleech situation, but home seeding can be easily done.
• Download as much as you possibly can (within limits), being sure to change the settings in your BitTorrent client to allow for additional simultaneous active torrents (see ‘Optimize µTorrent‘ below). For home seeding, this is probably the most important tip of all: Know Your Music. It will be extremely advantageous if you know your stuff. Look for the tag [2008] or [2007] on popular releases (especially the latest albums from popular artists) - these’ll assuredly be steady seeders as a limitless supply of new "leechers" will continuously be coming into the swarm. Think musically - what will people be searching for?
• Use A Spare Computer (or two) — What.cd allows for you to use your account (to download torrents) at three simultaneous IP addresses, so if you have a spare computer (or two) in the house, fire ‘em up and start snagging. Be sure to properly configure each client on each machine beforehand, as well as fixing the TCP/IP where applicable (see tips below).
• Optimize µTorrent — See here for how to properly optimize µTorrent for connectivity and speed. Another guide can be found here. To do any serious downloading & seeding, "Queue Settings" in the Queueing section should be changed to allow for more active torrents. The defaults in the image below are 8 and 5 - these are much too low. Adjust as necessary.
• Fix Your TCP/IP Limit — There’s not much point in downloading 50 torrents and trying to seed them all simultaneously when you have a low "max allowable half-open TCP/IP connection" set to 10 or less. WinXP users can fix tcpip.sys with the Llvlord patch, and Vista users should see here. If you use uTorrent, be sure to change it in the settings there, as well. The uTorrent default is "8" - so jack this value up to 50 (or even 100) in Settings > Advanced:
• Reseed Previously Downloaded Files — Most of the music I download stays on my computer in their original folder names, so reseeding these folders is a snap (and free!). Simply re-download the *.torrent file, open it in µTorrent (but don’t start it yet), and click the browse button in the top right corner - and browse to the old folder, wherever it may be. Click "OK" once the path is found, and click "OK" to start the torrent - it should begin the process of checking it, then it should seed.
TIP: After following a few different freeleech promotions, we’ve noticed that the exact same torrents become extremely popular during each of them; so to some extent, torrent behavior (popularity) is somewhat predictable. Reseeding works great with popular releases, as well as large ‘packs’ that were acquired earlier (perhaps during a previous freeleech).
• Partial Downloading — The oldest trick in the book. Savvy seeders know that during a freeleech, many people will arrange the torrents by "leecher" to see what’s currently popular. More importantly, what they also know is that less-knowledgeable members will download these torrents entirely (not partially), in the hopes of being able to seed to the many so-called ‘reported’ leechers. This never works. While this approach costs nothing during a freeleech anyways (so it’s OK to do), it’s better to partially seed large torrents to catch the ones who download the entire torrent.
The way to accomplish this in µTorrent is to load the torrent (but do not start it). Then, click the "Files" tab at the bottom, and highlight files you wish not to download. Right click and select "Do Not Download" - these will be skipped. (use the SHIFT and CRTL keys for multiple selection). Then, simply start the torrent.
• DCP / COMIC / Minutemen Packs — We haven’t had much luck seeding comic packs during any freeleech - most users are too busy scooping music they’ve always wanted. Having said that, they’re a great investment in the long run. It costs you nothing to get now, and if you leave them seeding for a long period of time, they’ll eventually prove their worth. Patience is the key with these.
Shown below is a look at a uTorrent WebUI seedbox with a new 0day comic pack (after seeding it for 12 hours during the freeleech), and it failed to produce any beneficial upload stats. The "BBC Sound" torrent - added afterwards - produced some very satisfying results.
• ** BONUS TIP: — Use a Music ‘leak’ website to assist you in finding the latest albums that recently hit the music scene (in advance) - chances are, it’ll turn up on What.cd sooner than later.
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