I am trying to use Bittorrent for the first time, to get something not available anywhere else. It's about 73 MB. The Bittorrent download chugged along at 1-3 kBps for a few hours, then stopped, 7:40 Saturday morning, and hasn't started again.

Later Saturday I logged into a remote server, built a Bittorrent client, tried from there: it downloaded at about 300 kBps for a few minutes until it arrived at exactly the same point, then stopped. The files are identical.

For variety I logged into Windozze today, downloaded utorrent, tried the same download and got nothing.

I speculate that my first download put it into a cache that the second found, that that cache was empty today.

The evidence points to only 1 'seeder' that went down, or turned off its server, though my client tells me sometimes there are as many as 4.

I don't know what to make of this: did the host of this rarely-downloaded (demonoid says it has been downloaded 71 times in 3 years) file get exhausted by my attempt?

That would tell me that that actually is the whole file, and that it completed each time.

Maybe it's one of those fake files?

The torrent is not fully seeded. The statistics are not necessarily accurate about how many downloads over time either. The best you can try is to leave the torrent app open for a very lengthy time, such as days/weeks and hope that someone comes on line with the remainder of the torrent, but I'd guess this to be unlikely. Firstly there's no explaining human behavior, or why people create fake torrents, or incomplete torrents. Secondly, not accusing you either, but if the content is illegal then it could be two or more possibilities, the two I can think of are entrapment or avoidance. For instance some persons could have the entire contents, but only seed the full content very rarely so as to not be caught. And by the way if your app gets the whole torrent and then is seeding it, then suddenly you become a potentially identifiable source of that content, be that a good or bad thing. The entrapment side of it is that it will never be a complete torrent but you would still be a peer and potentially identifiable also, same result. What I've found is that if the torrent does not get resolved and always goes to sleep, then for whatever reason, legal or not, it's likely that it will never get fully resolved/downloaded. So just move on from it. Best recommendation I really can make there.

I can tell it's not the whole file by inspection; the Bittorrent client reports 24.1 completion as well.

Why a fake file? A prank? A tease? A honeypot?

I left Bittorrent running last night; it downloaded another .27%

I'm running a client-only app.

The stuff I've gotten so far is non-contiguous: why would that be?

Does its absence from Torrage and Torcache mean anything?

At 24.1% complete you're not going to have much of anything and it really depends on whether it's 1 file or 10,000 files and the sizes of them all. The fact that things are non-contiguous is normal. That's how torrents work, they transfer small blocks. I don't know how it decides what to transfer and how, just that it does.

As to why a fake file? All your guesses are pretty much on the spot, and there could be a few more variations.

Is what you're trying to obtain legal?

I think you said it's very old, or out of date, or obscure. There just aren't any guarantees here, this is sharing for the sake of sharing, not a supported download site.

That's my guess too. Probably the person who is seeding it doesn't have the whole file, so the OP can only get the segment(s) of the file that is/are available. Not much you can do about it.

fwiw, i've had similar things happening...
couldn't finish a download although it was connected to dozens of seeders...
sometimes you just can't have it, let go of it.
as to why...
imagine a scenario of 71 seeders, spread across the globe. none of them have their bittorrent client running constantly, but only launch it when they want to download something themselves... otoh they never clear out old torrents, so they keep seeding forever, but at random intervals and rarely... maybe restricting upload bandwidth to something less than 1kB/s per torrent... plus one random user that gives full bandwidth to this exact torrent, but only for a few minutes... who knows why, maybe because their torrent client is configured so, maybe because they went to sleep...

BECAUSE this sort of thing is DOCUMENTED!!!!

Prenda law posted a torrent ( in secret - but tracked back to John Steele --yes real name)
he posted it then tried to MASS SUE !!! people

yes the OWNER of the copyright posted it !!!! ( making it a LEGAL COPY!!! )
then
tried to mass sue for copyright infringement

just google prenda law and AF Holdings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law



without ANY!!! of the needed information
like THE NAME of the file
the torrent seeds
and a link to said torrent
or the output of "read-torrent"
https://github.com/mafintosh/read-torrent

there is really NO way anyone can help

all we can do is GUESS!!!




i thought that "demonoid" was forced to turn over EVERYTHING including the site over to the MPAA and RAAA

" IT'S A TRAP !!!!!! "

I didn't hear about that, but even it never happened that doesn't mean it won't happen 5 minutes from now.

Also, I misunderstood what RandomTroll meant by "stopped". I realize now that he meant "stalled", which probably means, yeah, that none of the seeds had the whole file.

I don't know anything about "Torrage" or "Torcache". Don't want to know either.

read-torrent took some effort to build: needed to install node and npm. It returns

for every argument.

I am Bittorrent-naive, so general information helped. As to this specific torrent I am ready to accept mere guesses. I don't expect a solution. The stuff I'm looking for is odd stuff, about 20 years old, that I never expected to hear. I've heard about Bittorrent but never used it. This is an appealing target. One whole piece, 29 seconds long, has come through. It's just odd, nothing I would recommend to anyone else.

Thanks, Robby! The current version of Demonoid is a directory which refers to seeders' content. It had the download count, but also noted that it was out-of-date. I didn't cite it as authoritative.

Anytime I've been involved with the use of torrents I've found that it's not been the best choice.

1. Most likely the reason a torrent is involved is whatever I'm trying to download is controlled content which either needs to be normally paid for, or may be downright illegal content
2. For perfectly legitimate content, I've always found that the legal purchase avenues are clearly open or if the content is free such as Linux distributions, I've always found that non-torrent download sites are highly available
3. Torrents are, as you've found, randomly seeded and therefore not guaranteed to complete
4. Torrents could be nefarious files and not really what you intended to download
5. Hence the whole concept was potentially a good idea if download speeds were still sufficiently slow, if servers could not be maintained to support direct downloads as well as they are today, but now I feel servers are more than capable of maintaining their performance without the need to distribute the download across multiple hosts