Why does Tribler not download from Peers?

[NetDude6]

Why does Tribler only download from Seeds and not from Peers?
Is there an option I missed to allow downloading from Peers?
Downloading only from Seeds really limits the download bandwidth.

[qstokkink]

There is a trade-off in peer selection: who do you connect to for the best download speed? On the one hand, adding more connections adds more overhead messages. That means you cannot use that same bandwidth for your download and it slows down. Bad! On the other hand, adding more peers does improve the potential of connecting to peers that might upload with high speed. Good!

What the torrent protocol has to do, to address the trade-off, is compare and pick peers. There are extremely lengthy discussions on what strategies to use for this comparison and peer picking (like arvidn/libtorrent#4989). What peers end up being picked depends on how much of a file they downloaded and how much bandwidth they seem to have, etc.

So, with the above in mind: what you're seeing is the peer selection in action. Is it the best course of action? No. This is very much a heuristic that the people in charge of the BitTorrent protocol (which does not include us, over here at Tribler) are arguing a lot about and changing all the time. What Tribler does is simply adopt the current best-practice: in your case, it ends up with a lot of seeders.