Originally Posted by
rvt
Sorry, I've just realised you bolded a part of the post. Thought you were talking about broadband vs dial up (it's been a long day).
Yes, it does depend on the pieces that each peer has for things to be flying along without seeds.
In most clients, they will have a number somewhere, possibly near the number of seeds you are connected to. It'll usually be a float (decimal) number, something like +7.45
This is the number of complete copies that can be made if all the seeds went away.
This is not purely average completion, but it's related.
A number of 10.0 would mean that you can build 10 copies from all the pieces. There would be enough peers with enough of the pieces for your client to work effectively without seeds.
If the number of peers outweighs the number of seeds, and the seeds have full connection queues (they are busy sending to others), your client could still pick up some decent speed using only peers.
A higher average completion in this instance means more copies available from peers.
A number of less than 1 means that you will be connecting to seeds, or, if the queues are full, waiting on other peers to receive and pass on those pieces. You want a higher average completion in this instance as well, as it means you can quickly catch up to the rest of the group from peer connections alone, as they will be sharing very little data between them and so have a lot of open slots.
Once you've caught up, you'll be stuck in the same traffic jam waiting for the few seeds to pass on the pieces. So the higher the average completion, the less pieces you have to wait for once you've caught up.
If you are a seed in the first situation, depending on your upload speed peers may be able to find faster downloads from another peer (or ten).
Edit: if the above doesn't make much sense, I'll take another shot after I get some sleep.
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