Once or twice I've gone and found another source for the download, copied it into my torrents folder, forced my torrent client to re-scan the file and started seeding it.
Watching a thousand other clients tick over from 99% to 'seeding' is weirdly gratifying.
I recently had a torrent finish after a year and a half. It wasn't something I was really concerned about but it gave me a nice feeling to know it had finished.
Why do people do this? Readmes and nfo files take up literal kilobytes.... even over hundreds or even thousands of downloads, at most it's going to take up a few extra megabytes of download/storage, they're not saving anything at all. And it can be nice when the nfo includes all the releaser's original encode settings and stuff.
For video files I always set it to download first and last parts of files first. You can watch a video fairly well with like 50% downloaded if the file has the first and last section, which contain the data about how the video is stored. It'll have occasional glitches, but it mostly works. At 99% it's effectively all there and you may not even notice that last 1%, let alone 0.1%.
What's even worse is when a torrent is stalled at around 94%, there's exactly one seeder with a full copy in the peer list, but he has fucked up networking rules (or an intentionally choked upload because he's a dirty leecher) so that despite having an open connection in the peer list, they never send any data...
anything under about 20kb/s is pretty much dead on the larger torrents.... a lot of people will turn down their upload limits so that protocol traffic can pass but actual pieces never get sent. It's irritating to say the least.
This seems to happen alot. I always wondered if it is really a peer or some weird spoofed peer that just tries to give you hope before crushing your dreams.
i had a similar one, godawful speed (i don't remember how much, but it was measured in single or double digit kbit/s) and turned on their computer when i went to bed, and off exactly when i came back from work.
ended up leaving the computer on the whole day for a few days. this guy owes me 5 bucks.
If he's the single seed left on a torrent, chances are he's the last seed on a bunch of other torrents as well, and his bandwidth is being choked by everyone who wants his stuff.
Everything always downloads at full speed (limited by disc write speed in my case), so if there's missing data you find out about it within a min or two instead of after 3 days of trying.
Usenet also includes parity data so you can rebuild missing data to an extent.
Yup, point is I find out much much sooner and can move on to a new nzb. A single ~15gb nzb takes 5min max whether it succeeds or not. I'm never ever waiting on slow seeds.
Multiple providers can improve availability, but I've seen no need. Everything myself or my users have requested has been found and downloaded within 25min, including re-tries. Typically it's about 15min from user request to 'available to watch' email notification.
Worse case I can fallback to torrents, but I haven't had to yet with over 31tb out of usenet alone.
For the few things I can't find; there's still torrents. Usenet is just my primary source, and it covers 99% of what gets requested through my systems.
Private trackers can be a bitch to get into, and you have to re-seed what you download exposing yourself to copyright claimants and/or pay for a vpn on top.
I just raw dog a usenet server for 5min/movie and I'm done. Faster, easier, and risk free.
What does the 0.1% of the file contain anyway, if it's a video and most of the data is there it might be either playable or if not it probably might be able to be repairable so it can play, albeit with minor corruption in the damaged part.