BitTorrent – Is There a Tool to View a Torrent File?

I agree with Caleb that splitting the bandwidth is probably going to be the easiest, however, as a more roundabout solution, you might want to take a look at Micro Transport Protocol. uTP has been designed by the uTorrent guys to try and mitigate latency issues caused by BitTorrent which I assume is the root of your issue. In my experience it works quite well and there's a noticeable difference on my ADSL connection, for example.

In the free software ecosystem, uTP is supported by KTorrent (4.0+) and Transmission (2.30+). Vuze also implements it, but not on Linux. And, of course, the official uTorrent client supports it.

qBittorrent does have scheduling!

However, it may or may not be sufficiently sophisticated for your needs.

Scheduling Global Changes in Limits for Specific Days/Times

Click Tools > Options.... Click the Speed tab on the left. At the bottom of the window you'll see options to set the upload and download rate limits for Alternative Global Rate Limits.

Then click the check box labeled Schedule the use of alternative rate limits and specify the time you need in From and To boxes, and the days you need in the When drop-down menu.

This lets you schedule alternate upload and download speed limits from the global limits set at the top of the window.

The above screenshot is from qBittorrent v3.0.6 (the latest version as of the time of this writing), running on my Ubuntu 11.10 system, installed from this official PPA.

If you find you are not able to do that with your qBittorrent installation, I recommend upgrading. If that still doesn't help, I recommend editing your question to provide information about what happens when you try to access those settings, including relevant screenshots.

It might be that you're aware of this, but that you need more sophisticated scheduling that qBittorrent doesn't possess. If that's the case, please edit your question to provide more information about exactly what features you need. Then someone might know a way you can achieve your goals, or if not, might be able to recommend a similar bittorrent application that does have the necessary functionality.

The following is a list of useful features that are not currently available in qBittorrent.

Per-Torrent Limits Don't Have Scheduling

As you probably know, you can set per-torrent upload and download limits. Unfortunately, you cannot set per-torrent schedules. That feature is still missing from qBittorrent.

You Can Only Define 2 "Profiles" at a Time

There are Global Rate Limits and Alternative Global Rate Limits. That's it.

So you can (for example) cap torrent download speed at 75 KiB/s unless it's Tuesday, when it's capped at 50 KiB/s.

But you cannot (for example) cap torrent download speed at 75 KiB/s unless it's Tuesday, when it's capped at 50 KiB/s, or weekends, when it's capped at 100 KiB/s.

One of the implications of this is that the start and end times for alternative global rate limits cannot be different from one day to the next. This, together with the requirement that rate limits be defined only for intervals contained within a single day, means you cannot use alternative rate limits (for instance) all day Sunday and on Monday until 5 am.

Constraints on Which Days Can Contain Scheduled Time Spans

The When drop-down menu only allows you to select:

• the whole week, or
• any particular single day of the week, or
• weekdays only (i.e., Monday-Friday), or
• weekends only (i.e., Saturday and Sunday)

You cannot make alternative rate limits apply, for example, just on Mondays and Tuesdays, nor, for example, on Monday-Friday except for Wednesday.

Every Week Is The Same (Unless You Change It Yourself)

If you use alternative global rate limits this Thursday, they will be used next Thursday as well unless you edit your configuration in the interim.

Alternative rate limits

• cannot become active on a user-specified date,
• cannot become inactive on a user-specified date,
• cannot automatically vary from month to month, and
• to state the limitation generally, cannot happen automatically at different times or limit to different rates, from one week to the next.

If you want to request a feature...

You might want to submit a feature request for whatever features you need, but, as with any feature request in any software:

• Make sure to search first.
• There is no guarantee your request will be implemented.
• If it is implemented, there is no saying when it will be implemented.

More specifically to qBittorrent, please keep in mind if you're going to request this feature:

• Issues (bugs, feature requests, and the like) for qBittorrent are currently tracked here on github (as explained in qBittorrent's FAQ).

• This feature request (which was mentioned in comments) is not a request for any of the absent features listed above. If it were acted on, that would probably still not do what you need.

  Instead, it appears to be asking for (1) an explicit zero option, or more effective blocking of all upstream or downstream traffic, (2) the ability to deactivate distributed tracking functionality (DHT and PeX) as part of the alternative limits.