That would be really nice of you. Thanks for the offer. But why would you do that? Don't you have to trust someone to give them an invite? If I were to get myself in trouble with the tracker wouldn't your own membership be in jeopardy? I guess the whole point of the invite only system is to keep the whole community "trusted", but it also means that the community is very inclusive. I assumed that invites would only go to actual friends in IRL. And ones that you really trust at that. Those sorts of systems are usually intended to keep out "the man", aka RIAA/MPAA spies etc. I get the impression though that with private trackers there are other goals as well.
I've seen people invite begging on various forums and it always seems a bit cheeky to me. After all, you are asking for someone to trust their membership to you. It just so happens that I am strictly a 1:1+ ratio kind of guy. I always was even back on Emule and Edonkey2000 before that. I have always felt that I should give back to the swarm at least as much bandwidth as I take. It only seemed fair. And of course with my 35/35 symmetric connection it is ridiculously easy to get 1:1 or greater at least on a public tracker. Still you have no way of knowing if I am telling the truth. Although I'm not really sure why a leecher would want to join a private tracker in the first place unless they were planning on using a ratio faker program or something and I've heard that the trackers are getting better at detecting those.
stoi said:
Also it doesnt matter how many is in the swarm, you can only connect to so many of them, My client is set to 50 peers per torrent (obviously you can increase this, but increase it into the 100`s and your OS will have a heart attack.)
so 10 seedbox seeders, and 30 leechers, the 30 leechers will probably max their connections out.
1000 seeders and 30 leechers, you more than likely wont especially on a public tracker, as those leechers can only get stuff off 50 each, and if those 50 each are uploaing at 1KBs, then the max you can download is 50KBs.
Like the member above me said, it depends who is on the torrent, and who you can connect to at the time.
Well I do somewhat agree with you in theory. It is only the people in the swarm that you are actually connected to at any given time that matter. I am just going from experience (almost exclusively on public trackers). In my experience 9 times out of 10 a larger number of seeds+peers (total number of clients in the swarm) correlates to faster download (and upload) speeds. Typically I find that I end up connecting to somewhere between 200 and 300 seeders and leechers in the average swarm which is big enough to support it. Even if the swarm has 5000 BT clients in it, it is not like I can connect to all of them. It's kind of frustrating actually because I don't understand why I can't connect to more clients.
Of course there is the popular idea that only the number of seeds matter. In my experience this simply is not (always) true. Although it may be true if you don't have a high upload speed or if it is a small swarm. Sometimes I will download 2 or 3 equivalent torrents on TPB and compare the download speeds and see how it correlates to the seed

eer stats. Let's say there is a 500:500 seed/peer swarm and a 500:1000 seed/peer swarm. Most people would probably go for the 500:500 swarm, but I would expect the 500:1000 swarm to actually perform better for me. My theory is that I am leveraging my high upload speed to benefit from the tit-for-tat part of the bittorrent algorithm in order to receive higher download speeds, but this only works for peers. Seeds don't care about how much upload bandwidth I contribute back to the swarm (unless they are superseeding). Also, I think the number of seeds is actually less important than the total number of complete copies of the file in the swarm. Sometimes the 500:1000 swarm will have more complete copies in it than the 500:500 swarm.
BTW, my download speeds increased by an order of magnitude when I finally tweaked the Windows XP Max Connections field to allow for 12000 connections instead of just 256 or whatever it is in SP3. But, yeah the OS can limit you as can a router if you use one. That is why I don't use a router.
As to why a larger swarm seems to mean faster speeds for me above the number of clients I can connect to I am not sure. There must be some explanation, but I don't have one. I just do what works (on public trackers).
Private trackers with strictly enforced ratios can be a very different can of worms. No longer does the community really rely on the tit-for-tat aspect of Bittorrent for fairness. In my limited ratio enforced private tracker experience (an open porn tracker that I am a member of) even a swarm with less than 10 clients can max out my connection. I think this is because there seem to be enough seeders just "camping out" on the torrent waiting to improve their ratios. Obviously when there are 20 seeders and you are the only leech and their purpose is to upload enough to improve their ratio stats your download is going to haul ass. And often it only takes 3-5 seeders or only 1 seeder like me who has high upload bandwidth.
But to me that situation seems kind of abnormal. I guess it is due to what P2P theorists refer to as the BT "credit crunch", where there seems to be a surplus of upload bandwidth and not enough downloaders to absorb it. A rather strange situation to someone used to public trackers or other p2p systems. One particularly nice thing about it (aside from maxing your downstream connection) is that it can serve to dramatically increase retention. Something that has always been the achilles heel for bittorrent. To this day I still can only find certain rare files on Emule, although they may take literally months to get even for a 700 meg divx movie file or 650 meg game CD.