this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

No issues at all! Obviously speed caps will be useful since eventually you'll have enough torrents that even gigabit will be saturated, but even a low speed can mean a lot over a long time.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 21 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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 4 points 2 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!

[–] Xianshi@lemm.ee 12 points 3 days ago

No with a VPN you are good. Sharing is caring.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 52 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.)

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 days ago

You’re a hero.

[–] butter@midwest.social 28 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I have this book. It's a few Kb in size and I have already seed Gb of it. It has an insane ratio. I think I will never delete that torrent.

[–] butter@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

Doing the lords work.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Is there an easy way to permaseed in qBittorent?

[–] butter@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

Permaseed is the default. To disable perma-seed would be to set an upload limit, like a time amount or a ratio.

I run a ratio of 2:1 for most stuff

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 4 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.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 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)

[–] nrabulinski@beehaw.org 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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 12 points 3 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.com 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 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

[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Not really, as long as your VPN setup is solid (assuming you need it to avoid letters) and you don't mind the bandwidth usage. I have some ratios in the 500s

[–] JackAttack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 4 days ago

This guy Seeds

[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 9 points 4 days ago

I have some ratios in the 500s

o7

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 11 points 3 days ago

Seeding is the true fuck you to the the media corpos.

Get fucked parasites.

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 10 points 3 days ago

I’m seeding around 1600 things. I tried to seed a news paper I need, around 5k items and it crashed qbit.

[–] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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

[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 11 points 4 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...)

[–] Slax@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Question for the group:

Using Unraid can I pull from sonarr and then add to Jellyfin (watch it) and also seed? That would be amazing. Usually I have my deluge stop seeding so I can move the file to my data folder and not have duplicate files

[–] Artaca@lemdro.id 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

On mobile but look up TRASH guides. That's what I used in my setup and I'm able to watch stuff almost as soon as it downloads and I still let it seed for awhile after. Also using Unraid, Arr apps, and Jellyfin.

[–] Slax@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Awesome I'll take a look!

[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I use qbittorrent so maybe this is why, but when my downloads finish theyre moved to my movies/tv folder but since qbittorrent handles that, it keeps seeding the files afterwards.

I don't know if it's good or not but I just created a library in Jellyfin pointing to my Media folder that I download torrents to. It's probably not the same as what you're doing since it's my regular desktop but it works for me.

My next goal is to get an actual home server so I can let my parents view my jellyfin too.

[–] nevetsg@aussie.zone 2 points 2 days ago

I download to a 1TB USB drive. ARR's then copy the completed files to the NAS proper. When the USB fills I clear up ~100GB of the oldest files. Then the cycle continues.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 7 points 3 days ago (5 children)

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.

Ooh I never thought to use the priority more! I'm doing that today!

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[–] RiQuY@lemm.ee 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 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.

[–] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

250 active connections is the limit with my ISP provided router

So buy your own.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 1 points 2 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.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

One related thing to watch out for is the state table size - one of my old cheap routers back in the day showed how full it was and it was hitting 100% a lot and seemed to grind the network to a halt when it did (I was in a house of 5 young people with lots of devices and multiple people torrenting behind a cheapo Netgear running ddwrt). That's what lead me to switch to high end or x86 based routers. Being able to see the state table stats really helps to know how likely it is to be a problem, it's so big when using opnsense on an x86 box that I don't think it ever goes above 1% now.

Edit: now that I think about it, if your VPN is working I wouldn't expect any states related to peer connections to show up since your router won't be NATing them, I guess I was just bold back in the day because it was a huge problem then.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 6 points 3 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.

[–] SmokeFree@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago

does your ISP cap your data like 1TB per month? If you reach the 1TB, your speed will slow down.

[–] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In the case of Transmission, I've noticed that depending on server resources, there's an upper limit to how many seeds you can run and still get reasonable downloads. No idea why, but if you seed like 100-ish items, you basically never get decent downloads, and it's not like the upload speeds are great either, so it's not bandwidth.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think it's related to the number of open connections. If you have 100+ torrents you're going to have a lot of open connections to leeches, so your new downloads will have to wait for slots to open.

You could fix it by setting all of your seeding torrents as low priority, so your new normal-priority downloads will start.

[–] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 1 points 2 days ago

That was my first thought, but messing with connection max and priority doesn't seem to really change the situation, although maybe it is X percent better, it's just not a panacea.