As a torrent seeder, does one’s max upload speed affect their likelihood of connecting w/ leechers? I know about port forwarding and all that jazz, but suppose a leecher adds a torrent with 10 seeders—does the leecher’s client give any sort of preferential treatment for seeders w/ faster connections or is it basically each seeder has an equal (in this case, 10%) chance of being the chosen one? In other words, do seeders w/ normie home internet connections have a disadvantage over those w/ the faster connections?
Yes location and Upload Speed does come into play when a modern torrent client tries to pick which seeders to connect to. Users with very high upload speeds will obviously get more connections. This is why it’s super hard for users to get Upload on private trackers like RED where a lot of users use 10-20 Gbps seedboxes. Your average 500 mbps connections has no chance against it, you’d get around 1-5% upload of the size of that torrent if you’re lucky. There’s also a thing where Seedboxes would pick seedboxes that are in the same data centers, racks as them and would cross-seed/leech between themselves first.