discuss I2P

I have noticed some downloader with a really slow speed in a swarm.

The torrent is well seeded (~4-8 peers), and there is a single downloader with a slow speed in the range of 100s of Bps (as reported by I2PSnark).

This downloader has been present for at least a couple of weeks, i think. The torrent's size is about 10 GB, and the downloader's reported percentage was lower before, but now it's about 10%.

Is there something to worry about, or is it just some random person sitting with a dialup-like connection trying to download a thing?

There is a downloader who has over 600 torrents queue and only downloads less than 1 Megabyte after initial client startup. If left be he will take all your seeder slots and you become ineffective in seeding. During the initial torrent swarm he uploads a few Megabytes to keep his slot, but afterwards is a very bad peer. Though he has not been banned because of sending bad data he is definitely slowing the speed of the swarm. If in i2pd you close the stream the data transfer gains its speed. I had to write a bash script to automate closing peer streams who have too many connections and modified my client to not find peers on seeds (wait for peers to call me first), but it does not completely solve the issue.

Update: that downloader is now at about 17%.
Thus, they've downloaded about 700-900 MB over a bit more than 2 weeks.
That makes it something like 600 bytes per second on average...

There can be several reasons for deviant behavior in file sharing. For example, someone could try to find out the real IP addresses and keep the peers online for as long as possible. Then there are those who try to achieve a higher overall speed by downloading as many files as possible in parallel or simply want to have everything at once.

The enormous effort involved speaks against the first example. But if you are prepared to invest a great deal of time and effort, your income is unlikely to depend on success. The real danger in file sharing is, as is well known, cease and desist letters. Outside of the top 100 torrents, this risk decreases significantly. I think it's unlikely that it's worth the effort with the mostly classic video material distributed here.

The latter example is supported by the fact that people are often unaware of the function of the underlying network. Some people probably think it is only their duty to take up everything that is offered. They want to be seen as decent participants. However, they don't talk about it. What we do know is, the phenomenon of overloaded BitTorrrent clients has been around since BitTorrent has been here.

Deviating behavior in file sharing does not necessarily have to be against the rules. As long as they do not cause any damage to the peers and the noise necessary for the network is generated, it has the same justification as fast or h&r downloading.