[PLUG] Torrents of confusion

[John Jason Jordan]

I have been downloading live/install ISOs for differrent distros lately. I use Ktorrent, which allows me to see a lot of detail about what is going on. My cable connection here is generally good -- if a server can send me data fast enough I have seen download speeds of 5-600K/s and upload speeds of 150K/s or so. I understand the basics of how torrents work, but the download/upload results I get with torrents are not making any sense in a number of ways.

As I write this I am doing the following:
F7-test2-livecd-i386.iso 27 seeders, 2 leechers, avg download speed 25K/s, avg upload speed .5K/s, share ratio .02
*feisty-desktop-amd64.iso, 2 peers, avg download speed 56K/s, avg upload speed 8.5K/s, share ratio 7.83
*livecd-amd64-installer-2006.1 [Gentoo], 1 peer, avg download speed 43K/s, avg upload speed 5K/s 1.23
*openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-x86_64.iso, 48 peers, avg download speed 81K/s, avg upload speed 30.5K/s, share ratio .94
*ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386, 2 peers, avg upload speed 3.5K/s, share ratio 1.01

* = 100% downloaded, just seeding

There are several things that do not make sense:

1) I started all these downloads about five days ago. Why have I shared 7.83 times for feisty and only 1.01 for the i386 of Dapper? Surely the i386 of Dapper would be way more popular than the amd64 of feisty, right?

2) Why is F7-test2 downloading at only 25K/s when there are 27 seeders with 100% to offer, and only two leechers besides me?

3) At this moment I am averaging a total of 30-35K/s upload and 25K/s download, yet my internet connection is lagged into next week. When I click to send this e-mail it will take about 1.5 minutes to find the server, another minute for authentication and handshaking, and another minute to transmit. That's for ONE e-mail, a process that normally takes 15-20 seconds. And web pages load so slowly the glaciers will be completely melted before some of them appear. I have enough bandwidth that the up-and downloading I am doing should be almost unnoticeable. And I know it's something with the torrents because if I close down Ktorrent my internet connection goes back to normal. I don't even have to close it down -- just hitting the Stop button returns me to normal operation. What is sucking up my bandwidth?