I never do the latter anymore. was downloading a pretty rare dvd rip awhile ago I only found after a really long time. download was slow, for about 4 days I was downloading and then seeder went offline and afaik never came back up. now I try to make sure if im the only seed to try and make sure they get priority to decrease the chances of that happening
EDIT: btw props to btdigg, I did eventually find it in some collection thanks to that