FAQ

  1. What is zButterfly?
  2. What is torrent / bittorrent?
  3. How do I Uninstall zButterfly?
  4. What do I do If I have a Firewall software?
  5. The Internet gets slow when zButterfly is active
  6. I get green smilies but my downloads are still slow
  7. How to determine your upload speed
  8. I am getting a "Disk read error" message when trying to download a content, what do I do?
  9. What do I do if my network connection keeps dying?

What is zButterfly?

zButterfly is both a network of content and an all-in-one bittorrent application that allows you to find, download, play and share high-quality content.
Find: You can search for torrents directly from the zButterfly.
Download: Download quickly and efficiently with intelligent bandwidth, queue and speed management.

What is torrent / bittorrent?

Bittorrent is a way for computers to distribute large amounts of data in a highly efficient way, and is a very effective way to download large files, such as high-definition (HD) and DVD-quality videos. A torrent is simply a description of a file or collection of files that is being distributed via bittorrent.
zButterfly client has a rich-featured bittorrent client at its core for downloading files and participating in bittorrent file distribution.

How do I Uninstall zButterfly?

Uninstall zButterfly through Programs->zButterfly-> Uninstall zButterfly or %appdata%\zButterfly\ Application\uninstall.exe

What do I do If I have a Firewall software?

Just like the wide array of routers available to consumers, so too is the list of software firewalls, and each has different features and capabilities. Because of this huge variance, we will again attempt to approach this as broadly as possible. A software firewall can offer the same protection that a router can and it can mimic the symptoms of a NAT error. So why should you use both? A router can only protect you from incoming data on certain ports - a good software firewall can monitor outbound traffic too. Consider this an added layer of security.

If you use a software firewall on their PC, the following information applies to everyone who hopes to fix their NAT error.

  • You should never have more than one software firewall installed and in use at any given time (analogy: two drivers wanting control of a steering wheel).
  • In order for zButterfly to run correctly, access/permission must be allowed.
    • If your software firewall has options for a security level, reduce it from "high" to "medium" if it isn't already there.
    • Your software firewall must allow "zButterfly.exe" access/permission.

The Internet gets slow when zButterfly is active

If web browsing seems slow while zButterfly is active, you may try to correct that by limiting zButterfly's speed.

In general, zButterfly uses as much internet bandwidth that you let it have. It downloads and uploads as fast as possible. In practice, most users have asymmetric ADSL or cable modem connection (like 1024/256kbit or 10/1MBit), where the upload is the critical factor, as it is much smaller that download bandwidth from your ISP. If zButterfly takes over all your upload bandwidth, then even web browsing gets slow as even your outgoing requests for web pages get slowed down.

In most cases, you should not limit the download speed.

The easiest way to try to correct "slow internet" is to set the "global max upload speed" to 5-10 kB/s less than your max. upload bandwidth in Tools/Options/Transfer. (And please understand, that ISP's use kilobits/megabits, while zButterfly uses kilobytes by default. 1 byte = 8 bits) For example, an ADSL with 700 kbit/s upload bandwidth, which corresponds to maybe about 70-75 kB/s as effective upload capability. You might set max. global upload to something like 65-70 kB/s. That will leave enough bandwidth for web browsing and e-mails.

The more advanced way is to Use the built-in auto-speed functionality. That will sniff your internet connection speed and other usage and will manage the bandwidth that zButterfly uses. The basic idea is to prevent zButterfly from choking your upload bandwidth with too much traffic.

You can find it here: under Tools/Options in Transfer/Auto-speed

You can set it to be active for downloading and seeding and then select either classic or beta mode. In Beta you set it to 80% of max. upload capacity, or whaterver feels right after experimenting.

I personally prefer the autospeed "Classic" mode, as it can be tinkered to more detail. If you use Auto-speed classic, please remember to also set the max upload speed in its settings. (The "choking ping time" is the most important tinkering parameter there. It tells the autospeed, how well you want the connection to respond. I have it at 165 ms and decrease step at 10 kB/s to have aggressive speed reduction, if needed.)

I get green smilies but my downloads are still slow

If you get green smilies as torrents' "Health", then you know that your basic network settings are ok. However, that doesn't guarantee speedy transfers.

It is good to understand that

  • there is no central server from which you download. Everything that users download, is at the same time uploaded by users
  • you contact other users for your downloads
  • respectively, others should be able to contact you (NAT & port fowarding to be configured)

It is quite possible with a "new" torrent or an one with "small" swarm (only a few peers), that the missing pieces are not available. So, it is quite possible that torrent remains active with "downloading" status, but is not actively downloading anything as there is nobody to download from.

The low speed or inactivity may also be due to low amount of seeds/peers in the torrent, or their slow upload capability. As there is no central server, your download speed is directly dependent on uploads from others. The torrent's downloaders' total download speed matches the total upload speed.

Some key fields for torrent status:

  • Done: your own download completetion percentage
  • Availability: tells you how many full copies you see right now. If Availability is below 1.0, you don't see a full copy now and can't complete the download now. In new swarms, there is only the original uploader and others start empty. Thus the Availability may be over 1.0, but in reality most peers have only a few percents completed. This may lead to slow downloads. For example, if you are connected to 1 seed and 88 peers, your Done is 30% and Availability is 1.32 (132%), then in practise only the original seeder has full 100% copy, and the others (you included) have 32% of data. As you already had 30%, the other peers only have 2 more percents for you to download.
  • Swarm average speed: tells you how quickly others are downloading on average. Individual speeds depend on bandwidth (and luck), but the average is roughly what you should expect to reach yourself.
  • ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival. Fluctuates, but tells you a rather realistic forecast of remaining download time.

In typical situations with torrents you will see that the speed can vary a lot by individual torrents. For example, a typical scenario could be:

  • Torrent 1 is 62% Done, but has only .640 availability, so not much to download from. 0(1) Seeds, 33(97) peers. I have no contact with the single seed, who is the only one with the remaingin 36%. Download speed has dropped to less than 1 kB/s. The remaining download time (ETA) is over 21 days.
  • Torrent 2 is 52% Done, and has availability of 1.539. So, I have contact with the single seed (1.), but* the others are roughly where I am* (.539), so the speed is currently only 10 kB/s. ETA is 10 hours.
  • Torrent 3 is 20% Done, and availability is 37.989. so there is abundance of seeds and the download speed is 493 kB/s. ETA is only 7 min.

In general, your download speed corresponds a lot to you upload speed. So, having a more upload speed in your ADSL/cable connection will also speed your downloads.

The downloaded files can be really big. So the download can easily take hours or days with the biggest files. So it might be that there is not much to do in this case.

How to determine your upload speed

To configure zButterfly for optimum performance, you need to know the upstream capacity of your Internet connection, which can be obtained from your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Advertisements may include numbers like "1024/256 Kbps"; this represents the maximum bandwidth available to you. It is the number of kilobits per second (kbit/s or Kbps) you can download/upload with your connection. You may have seen speed measured in kilobytes per second as commonly reported by browsers. There is a difference between the two measures. In all likelihood, you upload slower than you download.

You may visit http://www.dslreports.com/stest or http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp for online speed tests. Stop ALL Internet activity on your machine (including torrents) for a few minutes before running a test. Repeat it twice to reduce number anomalies.

You can always set Config > Transfer > kB/s global max. upload speed to 0 -- meaning unlimited -- and observe. In any case, do not let zButterfly (or any other program for that matter) take up the whole upload bandwidth. There needs to be room for overhead such as acknowledgement signals (ACKs) and resend requests. Downloads will suffer if these signals cannot be sent. Set your upload limit to about 80% of the maximum possible.

I am getting a "Disk read error" message when trying to download a content, what do I do?

There are some users who are downloading content and the download goes into that state. Make sure to clear up some space on your hard drive, either by deleting unused files or by clearing up your recycle bin. After you have made enough space on the drive, go back to the Dashboard tab and click on the 'Resume' button.

If you are still receiving errors after freeing up some space on your drive, try doing the following:

  1. Go to the Advanced section of zButterfly (View > Advanced > My Torrents) to open your Torrent window.
  2. Highlight on the torrent that has the error.
  3. Click on the Stop button
  4. Right-click on the torrent and choose 'Force Re-check'.
  5. Then click on the Play button to resume download

It is also possible that an application is trying to access the same file, maybe an indexing service like Google Desktop, etc. Stop the application that is trying to access the Download directly or tell it to skip your download directory.

What do I do if my network connection keeps dying?

zButterfly (and BitTorrent clients in general) place a great deal of stress on the networking system - particularly network card drivers, and router/modem firmware - which can cause them (and/or the OS) to crash or lock up under load. I would suggest looking to see if there are newer drivers/firmware available for your hardware, or replace the buggy things completely.

However, there are a few things you can try to help alleviate the problem:

  • Limit the Maximum number of connections per torrent in zButterfly > Tools > Options > Transfer to 40 or less, as well as limit Maximum number of connections globally to 100 or less.
  • Reduce the Max simultaneous outbound connection attempts rate to 1 or 2 in zButterfly > Tools > Options > Connection.

Additional note: As a general rule, a lot of home-routers can only handle a total number of 255 connections open at any one time. Thus, if you have many machines running on one network, your router will quite likely occasionally either lock up / crash or randomly dump connections it decides it can't handle (depending on how well the firmware is written). Your only solution really is the above: reduce the number of possible connections (unless you can afford to shell out on an expensive corporate router that is!)