Opera torrents - problems and niggles

Opera's torrent-downloading capabilities are an important lifeline for anyone unlucky enough to be stuck behind a highly restrictive firewall. Alas, Opera has a couple of significant problems and certain niggling peculiarities with regard to its management of torrents.

I was hoping that the following problems would have been noticed and fixed for Opera 9.62, but it seems not. Could I really be the only one who has bothered to report them? Strangely, I can find no previous mention of torrents in these forums. Is there something I should know? Is the whole discussion forbidden for some reason?

Problem 1:
Empty "phantom" copies of torrents appear when Opera is reopened (following either a proper shut down or a crash). It doesn't happen to all torrents in the list, but I haven't worked out whether there is any specific characteristic that distinguishes those affected. It's all very mysterious.

Problem 2:
Opera somehow fails to see some partially or wholly downloaded files after a restart. The files are definitely present and intact, but they are somehow not recognized. I have found that re-stopping and restarting affected torrents may sometimes overcome the problem, but such a makeshift solution is far from ideal.

I have experienced these problems on three different Windows XP systems, including one that has recently been installed (now updated with SP3), and which has very little else installed. It therefore seems highly unlikely that the problems lie with my set-up.

Moving on to the niggles:

1) It seems strange to me that torrents that were active upon shutdown are not automatically reactivated upon start-up, as they are in FireTorrent for Firefox and Wyzo. (I still prefer Opera for torrents, because FireTorrent creates full-size dummy files when new torrent-based downloads are started, thus wasting precious disk-space for torrents that ultimately fail to complete, or sometimes even to begin.)

2) Opera loses the upload and download statistics upon shutdown, making it difficult to remember, after a restart, whether one has done one's fair share (or perhaps more than one's fair share) in keeping torrents alive and healthy. Combined with the problems outined above, this can make dealing with torrents in Opera fiddly and inconvenient. All relevant statistics could, I suggest, be written directly to disk in real time, so that a shutdown or crash would amount to nothing more than a pause. Also, fully downloaded files could be flagged as such in a small database, so that the amount of rechecking would be reduced when restarting multi-file torrents.

3) The upload and download speed calculations are too rough, and are sometimes highly inaccurate. Torrents that are temporarily inactive often still show a transfer speed, albeit usually a low one. Also, torrents that have completed are shown with a download speed that reflects the speed as it was during the final seconds of the download, rather than the proper speed of zero. This behaviour is confusing and counterproductive. Calculations must be reasonably accurate if they are to be of any use. Otherwise they are just a waste of processing time and screen-space.

4) There seems to be a huge imbalance between the upload and download speeds for some torrents, such that, for example, in the time it takes to receive a 1 GB file, perhaps 10 or 15 GB may be sent out to other downloaders. This seems an excessive ratio, and also seems to contradict the whole philosophy behind torrents. Specifically, I can't see how it could discourage leeching and reward sharing. Couldn't Opera be made to limit the imbalance in some way? It seems to me that a download-to-upload ratio of 1 to 2, or at most 1 to 3, would be sufficient for maintaining a fair contibution to the community, thus allowing torrents to stay in good health, yet without taxing Opera users disproportionately.

5) Torrents cannot simply be paused, but must be stopped, meaning that full file-checking is performed when they are restarted. This means, in turn, that information regarding the current file contents must be re-sent. But this was information that was present previously. Where did it go? Was it discarded? If so, why? A "Pause all" button would also be extremely useful, particularly when network traffic becomes too heavy, making the whole system unacceptably sluggish.

Finally, I have a suggestion for a small improvement. It would be very useful to see the numbers of seeds and peers for each torrent. The total appears at the bottom of the transfers page, but that is of little help in assessing the current state of individual downloads.

I agree, there is definitely a disproportionate ratio of outgoing traffic with torrents in oprea compared to incoming. I recently downloded a 2.7gb torrent and in the beginning the ratio seemed acceptable. I checked my bandwidth usage and even though I had only downloaded 70% of the torrent I had used up over 22gb! almost 50% of my monthly quota!! Whooaaa!! I love the Opera browser for its speed, and features like resume last session and the convenience of built in torrent downloads and I tell lots of people to use it instead of IE & firefox but the lack of torrent control settings is a deal breaker.

I have paused the torrent about 20 times because the in/out ratio and especially kbs in/out was not in my favour!!(eg:in 4.5kb/out 50kb) It has now taken me 3 days to go from 70% to 76%!!

C'mon guys give us some control over the torrent download settings.