bittorrent dl - still slow, does it pick up?

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 05:18:15PM -0400, billg wrote:

> I've never been especially impressed with torrent. It's never offered me
> much improvement over ftp.

A direct link to a fast server will be bandwidth limited.

However the real impact that bittorrent has is that it can lighten the
load of download servers many fold.

> Dunno if it makes much difference to torrent, but I'm within shouting
> distance of Duke and RedHat.  If they were handing out actual CD's, I
> could have made 4 or 5 round trips while waiting for the download to
> finish. :-)

I believe that bittorrent needs some tuning and a couple operational
enhancements.  One is a locality cookie (timezone would suffice).
Connecting to hosts in your own time zone would be a major win.

Next is improved awareness of bandwidth especially asymmetric
bandwidth.  I noted that I had way too many outgoing torrent
connections for my bandwidth (ADSL).  The sum of the data queue was
simply too large for the bandwidth. I would rather see one or two
almost persistent connections using 60-80% of the outgoing bandwidth
than 40 connections none of which moved enough data per unit time to
amount to a row of beans.

The good news is that the basic code has almost all the right knobs.
Currently is no good way to discover the right combination and
configure it. 

If I focus on one set of numbers 128kbit/s up and 1.5Mbit/s down
clearly I need to stay connected ~10x longer to repay the system than
I do to draw from it.  This is a very big differential and the current
default bandwidth and connection counts generate large demand troubling 
interactive latency.  I killed mine a number of times simply because
simple things like a Google search were just too slow.

There are some network wizards out there.  They should be able to add
a tuning table (perhaps /etc/torrent.conf) and in five questions be
able to collect a set of parameter such that folk would run a pay back
daemon for weeks or months at a time.  Right now without tuning it is
ill matched for the common ADSL or Cable modem situation and long term
payback daemon operation.

Anyhow, I have just restarted one as payback....

The concept is excellent.


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	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
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