This is a general "what's going on" kind of question.
I'm seeding a number of tv programs that are old and/or have little interest. For all of them there are <= 10 seeds.
The odd thing is the peer counts. Many have the very low numbers that you'd expect (<= 6), but about one third of them have over 100 peers! And only about 10% have between 6 and 100 peers.
In one case, there's a 4 season show from the middle of last century. Three of the seasons have 2-4 peers, and the remaining season has about 150 peers! There's nothing special about that season; and as I've been seeding it for a long time I can safely say from my ratio that it's actually the *least* downloaded of the seasons.
So what's going on? There's no way there are actually hundreds of people trying to download these things. What are these peers actually doing there? Is it a bug?
What are all the peers for?
-
Switeck
Re: What are all the peers for?
It may be a bug of sorts, but probably not where you'd expect!
Someone on that torrent may be trying to download it and have a constantly resetting+changing ip address, so the torrent tracker/s and Peer EXchange (PEX for short) report a huge peer count because of all the ip addresses seen over the last 10+ days. Some VPNs and proxy connection internet exit points may change too.
Or it could be a bunch of fake peers, put up by "poisoners" or monitoring groups. (Google if you want to know more...)
All it takes is 1 peer, seed, or tracker incorrectly reporting every ip ever seen on the torrent over the last year or longer (instead of forgetting "old" inactive ips after awhile) to have this happen.
Someone on that torrent may be trying to download it and have a constantly resetting+changing ip address, so the torrent tracker/s and Peer EXchange (PEX for short) report a huge peer count because of all the ip addresses seen over the last 10+ days. Some VPNs and proxy connection internet exit points may change too.
Or it could be a bunch of fake peers, put up by "poisoners" or monitoring groups. (Google if you want to know more...)
All it takes is 1 peer, seed, or tracker incorrectly reporting every ip ever seen on the torrent over the last year or longer (instead of forgetting "old" inactive ips after awhile) to have this happen.