Apply priority to torrents

[haravikk]

When transmission is set up such that there is a global limit to the total number of peers, it can sometimes be the case that large, low-urgency torrents end up with the highest number of peers, resulting in other torrents, that you may want to download quicker, being starved of peers. Pausing can be used to adjust this (pause the low-priority torrent so the peer allowance goes elsewhere, then re-enable it), but it's not ideal.

I think that some kind of priority system could help with this, whereby every torrent is given a slice of the global number of peers, with more being given to torrents that are downloading and seeding. Torrents with fewer peers will give up some of their allowance to others which have other peers available. Within this it would be possible to specify high and low priority torrents, doing-so adjust the number of peers that they are allowed to connect to automatically based on the number available.

This would basically be the same as choosing priority on files within a torrent, except determining the resources given to each torrent when downloading. In this way, I could add a large torrent that I don't require urgently to my list, and give it low-priority, so that other torrents I add get preferential treatment and download quicker, even if the low-priority torrent has the most available peers.

Currently the only way to do this is to individually assign peer-limits, and/or pause transfers that you don't want urgently, but this requires the user to do a lot of work for possibly less gain than a decent automatic system could achieve.

[livings124]

#1077 includes this idea.

[charles]

I would like to see this done on a per-group basis, such as assigning one group a higher priority than another group. That would be handy for ratio-based trackers.

[livings124]

I think per-torrent would make more sense, and is consistent with how it's done for files. It could then be applied to all torrents in a group. Forcing a user to use the groups feature to access the priority feature doesn't make much sense to me.

[livings124]

libT: r8254 Mac: r8260

[charles]

qt: r8255

gtk: r8258