I also see this error code routinely. When I first started with this site a few years ago, I noticed that torrent lines would turn red instead of the normal green. (Using utorrent 3.3.2 build 30303) I selected the "tracker status" column to display and those red lines have a HTTP Error 502 status. If push comes to shove and I need or just want to I right click the error line and select Update Tracker to force a retry.Â
IF it does not change back to green in a few second if not immediately, then my first presumption is that the tracker is busy busy and leave the poor thing alone. ;D
However, when I am starting a download and I get the 502 while it is searching for peers, I will try again rather than wait for the default (appears to be 30 mins) countdown for a retry.
From a client perspective, I believe that reducing the number of active seeding torrents does help. AND remember that for an individual torrent, the client will retry the connection after the timeout countdown had completed.Â
From a tracker perspective, taint much we end users can do. Aside from hardware / software issues, the load is the load, it ebbs and flows with time.
While I do not know the tracker software personally, empirically, it looks like if many requests that come from an individual client, past a certain number those request get pushed to the bottom of the request queue so all clients can get a fair shake at the tracker. (IMHO)
