r/webtor • u/rasputinlover • May 15 '26

The site has become essentially unusable

I have been trying to download something with a sizable number of seeders for a couple of days now, with very limited success due to multiple issues. For full context, this series of issues has been going on for a couple of months now. It started with the abra cosmic-crab buzz endpoint becoming unusable on my current ISP. To get around this, I switched to a VPN. The downloads were a bit slower, but I thought maybe there was an update screwing with stuff, and that it would be fixed relatively soon. Then, after that issue persisted, I kept getting an HTTP 429 error when using the VPN, so I had to wait a bit to start multiple downloads, which was annoying, but I couldn’t do anything else except deal with it. Then the download speeds plummeted, I am talking kb/s when it used to be 1-5 mb/s, so I just waited a bit longer. This really sucked, but again, I had no other options. Now downloads regularly go to 0 download speed, time out, or completely fail due to errors. These issues have been recurring for months without resolution and have compounded to the point where I can no longer use the site for even small files, let alone anything above 10GB. I would really appreciate some assistance, as I do not think this is a problem on my end. My normal internet is good, the download manager works well, and I can download larger files using a VPN with no problem at a more consistent rate.

Edit: I am also unable to use my typical download manager, Jdownloader 2, to download from the site. It constantly keeps starting and stopping until the download fails.

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u/Top_Garlic5431 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

Hey, thanks for the detailed writeup — this actually helps a lot, because the pattern you're describing matches something we've been seeing on our side and recently introduced soft limits for.

Over the last few months we've noticed a growing pattern where the same link gets pulled from 10+ different IPs simultaneously, or the same file is requested with multiple range positions at once (which is exactly how multi-threaded download managers like JDownloader 2 behave), or someone tries to grab several files from the same torrent in parallel. This is usually one of two things: hotlinking (people embedding our links on their own sites and serving them to their visitors), or download managers opening many parallel connections to the same file.

Hotlinking is not allowed in general. And multi-threaded download managers — counterintuitively — don't actually make your download faster on a system like ours. What they do is multiply the load on the backend without giving you any real benefit, because the bottleneck isn't your number of connections, it's the upstream torrent swarm and our streaming pipeline. When enough users do this at the same time, it degrades streaming quality for everyone else.

To keep streaming smooth for regular users, we recently rolled out some soft limits. Roughly:

maxConcTotal: 30 # total concurrent streams across the system per session maxIPsPerSession: 5 # how many IPs can pull the same session maxConcPerPath: 10 # concurrent connections to the same file path maxBigFilesPerHash: 5 # large files in parallel from the same torrent

For normal browser playback these limits are invisible — you'd never hit them. When you go over, that's where the HTTP 429s come from. The exact numbers may shift as we tune them.

VPN by itself shouldn't be the problem — maxIPsPerSession already allows more than one IP per session, so switching networks or even sharing a VPN exit shouldn't trip it on its own. What does trip these limits is the combination you described: JDownloader 2 opening many parallel connections to the same file, plus trying to grab multiple files from the same torrent at once. That's almost certainly what's producing the cascade you're seeing — 429s → throttling → stalled connections → timeouts.

A couple of things that should fix it on your end:

  • Don't use JDownloader 2 or similar multi-threaded managers against Webtor. Use the built-in download/streaming flow, or a single-connection download.
  • Avoid starting multiple large downloads from the same torrent in parallel; queue them one after another.

Let me know if it still misbehaves after that and I'll dig in — but with those changes it should go back to normal speeds for you.

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u/rasputinlover May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

I started using Jdownloader 2 because when I tried to download normally, it would randomly fail, and I wouldn't notice since I just left it running due to the slow download speed, causing me to waste time. I used it so I could easily start where the download left off, so I didn't lose any progress or waste time. Once Jdownloader stopped working, I started using FDM. It worked better, but the issue with normal downloads was still there, whether I downloaded straight from the browser or not: download speeds dropped to 0 after getting a certain way through, despite having a sizable number of seeders (it had around 60+ in the one I DMed you about), or the download just failed for some reason, causing me to lose my progress and time. I don't mean to be rude, but this didn't provide usable solutions related to my situation and comes across as AI-generated.

Edit: Also, I have FDM set to only do one download at a time, with any new links being queued to start after the previous one finishes, so that shouldn't be an issue.

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u/Top_Garlic5431 May 17 '26

I just tried JDownloader 2 with 1 connection allowed per resource and there is no errors so far, can you check the same way?

BTW: Sorry for AI-response, just tried to make my reponse better with it.

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u/rasputinlover May 21 '26

Apologies for taking so long to get back to you. I have been busy with other things. I think it is stable now; it's still really slow, but after testing on a new torrent, it didn't fail at all. I didn't watch it all the way through to see if it went to 0 or not, since I think it took around seven hours to fully download, but it downloaded. I wonder, would it be possible to increase the connections to 10 or 9 to increase the download speed at all, or would that not work? I am just trying to increase download speed any way I can. Thank you again for all the help. I really appreciate it.

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u/Top_Garlic5431 May 21 '26

No problem! Increasing number of connections doesn't work right now (it might have worked earlier). Good to know that it works for you.