SeedSlayer: Auto-stop seeding on torrents

Related Blog Post: Torrenting/P2P/Filesharing: How it Works

A while back, I realized that there must be thousands of people who sit around their computers, waiting for torrents to finish downloading, so that they can stop it from seeding. I’m talking about people downloading ethical torrents here, not the people downloading illegal files, although it applies to them as well. Many people don’t want their torrents to seed, for many different reasons. Some agressive ISP’s throttle download and upload speed, and many more have an upload limit. If you start downloading a torrent, then go to bed, chances are when you’ll wake up, it will have been seeding (uploading) for a while. The process of seeding can easily pass through your upload limit, charging you hundreds of dollars in extra “fees” that your ISP may charge for exceeding the limit. Whatever the reason, I realized that people must get tired of waiting for torrents to finish downloading, so they can stop them from seeding.

This got me thinking, and I wrote a script called SeedSlayer, which, as its name implies, stops seeding. With SeedSlayer, you can start your torrent downloading, and go to bed knowing that when you wake up, your torrent won’t have seeded at all, and will have stopped the process before it began. This means you can download files without having to worry about always watching your computer, because SeedSlayer will do it for you.

Although there are other means of stopping torrents from seeding, 99% relay that information to the torrent tracker (the server that keeps track of who’s downloading, who’s uploading, and what their settings are), so the tracker lowers your download priority, and you’ll get a reduced download speed. SeedSlayer doesn’t relay anything to the tracker. It simply runs in the background, waiting for your torrents to stop downloading, then it prevents the upload process.

In the simplest of terms,

Without SeedSlayer = Uploading (Uses valuable upload allocation, if applicable)

With other method = Slower Download Speed (Tracker knows you’re not going to seed, gives you a slower download)

With SeedSlayer = No Uploading/Seeding, No decrease in download speed.

If you’re interested in SeedSlayer, you can visit the project page (here), or the development blog (here).