PhpWiki - FAQ2

FAQs page 2

Stats

Most common reason for stats not updating

The server is overloaded and unresponsive. Just try to keep the session open until the server responds again. (Flooding the server with consecutive manual updates is not recommended.)
You are using a bad client.
If you are downloading any torrents from pre-17th of December 2005, & your client supports DHT, you must disable DHT for those torrents. See Announcements Forum

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Best practices

Give a decent upload speed back to the swarm/s you are downloading from.
Seed torrents back to a client ratio of 1:1 whenever possible.
Make sure you exit your client properly, so that the tracker receives "event=completed".

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May I use any BitTorrent client?

We ONLY support uTorrent, Vuze/Azureus, BitTornado & Deluge. Many other clients have been known to cause various problems, including but not limited to, bad stats & passkey leaks, such clients have been responsible for many people getting banned.

If you are using an unsupported client any problems you have are just that, YOUR problem, not ours or the people that help out in the support forum, we don't want to know about it, you're on your own.

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Why am I listed several times as leeching/seeding a torrent?

If for some reason (e.g. pc crash, or frozen client) your client exits improperly and you restart it, it will have a new peer_id, so it will show as a new torrent. The old one will never receive a "event=completed" or "event=stopped" and will be listed until some tracker timeout. Just ignore it, it will eventually go away.

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I've finished or cancelled a torrent. Why am I still listed as leeching/seeding?

Some clients, notably TorrentStorm and Nova Torrent, do not report properly to the tracker when canceling or finishing a torrent. In that case the tracker will keep waiting for some message - and thus listing the torrent as seeding or leeching - until some timeout occurs. Just ignore it, it will eventually go away.

I've been away from the site for a while and when I checked my account, my stats were set to 0. What happened?

Some maintenance was performed on the site some time ago but some accounts unexpectedly lost their stats and it was only those which were either inactive long before or those which were created around the time of the maintenance.
Unfortunately nothing can be done to restore them and your only option is to follow the advice is to read this thread in the forums.

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My stats have taken an impossibly huge nosedive. My profile says I've uploaded MINUS 9 quadrillion kB (US number scale). What happened?

This problem is caused by using the Transmission client (recommended against for use here) as it does not work properly on a private tracker such as PureTnA's own. Unfortunately nothing can be done to correct your stats but you may ask a moderator to disable your account so you can create a new one.

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Downloading

What is a Passkey?

A Passkey is a unique string of 32 characters that has been randomly assigned to your account. It helps the tracker identify you as a user.

When you download a .torrent file from this site, the Passkey is automatically added to the announce URL in the .torrent file. Therefore whenever that .torrent is used the tracker will associate it with your account, no matter what IP you are connecting from.

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Why did a torrent suddenly disappear & how can I find it?

One of several reasons:
(1) The torrent may have violated the site rules for uploading.
(2) The site publisher/webmaster may have requested that their content be taken down.
(3) The uploader may have deleted it for their own reasons.
(4) Torrents are automatically deleted when they've been dead (no seeders) for 30 days.
(5) The seeder may have disconnected, in which case the torrent will not be listed in the default "Active" browse, select "Including Dead" to browse all torrents. If you use the search function the default search only finds seeded torrents, to search unseeded as well add this to the end of your URL search string &incldead=1

(Tip) If you post a comment for torrents you download, you can view your comment history to quickly find any torrent you've downloaded that hasn't been deleted.

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How do I resume a broken download or reseed something?

Open the .torrent file. When your client asks you for a location, choose the location of the existing file(s) and it will resume/reseed the torrent.

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Why do my downloads sometimes stall at 99%?

The more pieces you have, the harder it becomes to find peers who have pieces you are missing. That is why downloads sometimes slow down or even stall when there are just a few percent remaining. Just be patient and you will, sooner or later, get the remaining pieces.

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What are these "a piece has failed an hash check" messages?

Bittorrent clients check the data they receive for integrity. When a piece fails this check it is automatically re-downloaded. Occasional hash fails are a common occurrence, and you shouldn't worry.

Some clients have an (advanced) option/preference to 'kick/ban clients that send you bad data' or similar. It should be turned on, since it makes sure that if a peer repeatedly sends you pieces that fail the hash check it will be ignored in the future.

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The torrent is supposed to be 100MB. How come I downloaded 120MB?

See the hash fails topic. If your client receives bad data it will have to redownload it, therefore the total downloaded may be larger than the torrent size. Make sure the "kick/ban" option is turned on to minimize the extra downloads.

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What's this "IOError - [Errno13] Permission denied" error?

If you just want to fix it reboot your computer, it should solve the problem. Otherwise read on.

IOError means Input-Output Error, and that is a file system error, not a tracker one. It shows up when your client is for some reason unable to open the partially downloaded torrent files. The most common cause is two instances of the client to be running simultaneously: the last time the client was closed it somehow didn't really close but kept running in the background, and is therefore still locking the files, making it impossible for the new instance to open them.

A more uncommon occurrence is a corrupted FAT. A crash may result in corruption that makes the partially downloaded files unreadable, and the error ensues. Running scandisk should solve the problem. (Note that this may happen only if you're running Windows 9x - which only support FAT - or NT/2000/XP with FAT formatted hard drives. NTFS is much more robust and should never permit this problem.)

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Tracker Errors

Bad Data From Tracker

This usually indicates a problem with the tracker. There's nothing you can do except try to connect again later.

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Torrent not registered with this tracker

1/ If the torrent is a new upload: The site & tracker are hosted across several servers, there can sometimes be a short delay before all of the torrent info syncs. Simply wait a bit, then stop & restart the torrent, repeat if necessary.

2/ If the problem persists, or if it's not a new upload: The torrent you're trying to download has been removed from the site. Either the owner of the torrent has decided to remove it from the site, or it was deleted for being contrary to rules, or the torrent has been automatically deleted by the system due to inactivity. Torrents are automatically deleted by the system when they've been dead (no seeders) for 30 days.

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Unrecognized Passkey (...)

The Passkey in the .torrent file you're using doesn't belong to an active user on this site. Try downloading your .torrent file again.

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Missing Passkey - download your .torrent file again

There is no Passkey in the .torrent file you're using. This usually indicates that you're using an old .torrent file (from before Passkeys were implemented on this site). Just sign in to your account and download the torrent again to fix this problem.

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Duplicate Passkey - go to http://www.pureTnA.com and download your own .torrent file!

There is a limit of 5 simultaneous connections on a single torrent per user. This allows you to seed/leech a torrent from multiple computers.

This error message will show up when a single user account tries to connect to a torrent more than 5 times.

If you're getting this error message and you have your own puretna.com account, did you upload your .torrent file to another web site? If so, that was a really bad idea, & probably why you're getting this error message. You should do everything possible to remove other peoples access to the file, & then seed like crazy before your ratio gets trashed.

If you don't have your own puretna.com account and you got to this site by downloading a .torrent file from another site, you'll need to sign up for your own account.

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Tracker error XX

Common errors are covered here & the bittorrent guides linked at the top of the page. Failing that visit & read our Help forum.

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Too many users. Try again later. / Nothing here! Possibly the tracker is restarting!

The tracker is overloaded. This type of error doesn't usually last long. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do except try to connect again later.

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Access denied, torrents limit reached.

You are trying to download more than 10 torrents at the same time. Each user is allocated a maximum of 10 download slots by the tracker to help prevent chronic leeching. There is no limit on upload slots though it is best to reduce the number of simultaneous uploads to maximise upload speeds on individual torrents. Changing this limit is currently not possible.

If you come across this error, stop all downloads immediately and restart downloading but with fewer downloads at the same time. It may take up to 24 hours for the tracker to acknowledge you downloading fewer than 10 downloads so be patient.

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How can I improve my download speed?

The download speed mostly depends on the seeder-to-leecher ratio (SLR). Poor download speed is mainly a problem with new and very popular torrents where the SLR is low.

(Proselytising sidenote: make sure you remember that you did not enjoy the low speed. Seed so that others will not endure the same.)

There are a couple of things that you can try on your end to improve your speed:

Do not immediately jump on new torrents

In particular, do not do it if you have a slow connection. The best speeds will be found around the half-life of a torrent, when the SLR will be at its highest. (The downside is that you will not be able to seed so much. It's up to you to balance the pros and cons of this.)

Make yourself connectable

See the What's all the fuss about being connectable & why should I care? section.

Limit your upload speed

The upload speed affects the download speed in essentially two ways:

Bittorrent peers tend to favour those other peers that upload to them. This means that if A and B are leeching the same torrent and A is sending data to B at high speed then B will try to reciprocate. So due to this effect high upload speeds lead to high download speeds.
Due to the way TCP works, when A is downloading something from B it has to keep telling B that it received the data sent to him. (These are called acknowledgements - ACKs -, a sort of "got it!" messages). If A fails to do this then B will stop sending data and wait. If A is uploading at full speed there may be no bandwidth left for the ACKs and they will be delayed. So due to this effect excessively high upload speeds lead to low download speeds.

The full effect is a combination of the two. The upload should be kept as high as possible while allowing the ACKs to get through without delay. A good thumb rule is keeping the upload at about 80% (when downloading only) of the theoretical upload speed. You will have to fine tune yours to find out what works best for you. (Remember that keeping the upload high has the additional benefit of helping with your ratio.)

If you are running more than one instance of a client it is the overall upload speed that you must take into account. Some clients (e.g. Azureus) limit global upload speed, others (e.g. Shad0w's) do it on a per torrent basis. Know your client. The same applies if you are using your connection for anything else (e.g. browsing or ftp), always think of the overall upload speed.

Limit the number of simultaneous connections

Some operating systems (like Windows 9x) do not deal well with a large number of connections, and may even crash. Also some home routers (particularly when running NAT and/or firewall with stateful inspection services) tend to become slow or crash when having to deal with too many connections. There are no fixed values for this, you may try 60 or 100 and experiment with the value. Note that these numbers are cumulative, if you have two instances of a client running the numbers add up.

Limit the number of simultaneous uploads

Isn't this the same as above? No. Connections limit the number of peers your client is talking to and/or downloading from. Uploads limit the number of peers your client is actually uploading to. The ideal number is typically much lower than the number of connections, and highly dependent on your (physical) connection.

Just give it some time

As explained above peers favour other peers that upload to them. When you start leeching a new torrent you have nothing to offer to other peers and they will tend to ignore you. The download speed should increase as soon as you have some pieces to share.

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