BitTrickle

[dizietsma]

After 20 years of using the Internet I finally decided to get something off "torrent" because it seemed to be the only way to get something before my daughter had to do a talk about it in her book club on Thursday due to the local libraries being out of stock.

Sadly this wasn't Jenna James doing Transformers 4 with Megan Fox so this has meant that after 26 hours we have only got 65% completed. The word torrent is obviously a marketing phrase. I demand this sort of dodgy stuff be faster! What is the world coming to?

Perhaps Web2 will bump it up to 9600 baud.

 

[Davros]

bit torrent can be very fast
the file would be hosted on someones pc and by other means you'd be limited to the max upload of the hoster which is on average 30k sec (if 10 people were downloading youd only be getting 3k sec)

 

[dizietsma]

bit torrent can be very fast
the file would be hosted on someones pc and by other means you'd be limited to the max upload of the hoster which is on average 30k sec (if 10 people were downloading youd only be getting 3k sec)

I think it's just an indication of how unpopular my tastes are!

 

[MfA]

You choose your daughter's books?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

I think it's just an indication of how unpopular my tastes are!

Certainly, if you're downloading stuff which isn't seeded by a whole lot of people, you're not going to get any speed to speak of. Especially considering that many people seeding torrent files are seeding more than one at a time, and if they're seeding something that is popular at the same time, then a seed of some obscure book that nobody cares about isn't going to get a large share of their available bandwidth given that they might have twenty other people receiving pieces of some other package.

Same thing happens with torrents that are old and the popularity and number of seeders has declined. Fresh new torrents can easily yield download speeds in the 100s of KB/sec if you have that fast a connection. I have routinely gotten over 200 KB/sec on torrents before because I'd been downloading something that a lot of other people are seeding.

 

[_xxx_]

Jenna James doing Transformers 4 with Megan Fox

Hmm, sounds quite exciting. "Transformers, revenge of the pole".

 

[zed]

I know what you mean, Ive only ever downloaded one thing, ~300mb or something it took more than a week

 

[Simon F]

You choose your daughter's books?

 

[Scali]

You choose your daughter's books?

That's the basis of good censorship and oppression

 

[Dooby]

Fresh new torrents can easily yield download speeds in the 100s of KB/sec if you have that fast a connection. I have routinely gotten over 200 KB/sec on torrents before because I'd been downloading something that a lot of other people are seeding.

Unfortunately, the problem with torrents is that they don't scale with download speed. I too only see about 200-400KB/sec on torrents, where as when I *USE* the *NET*, I get 6MB/sec.

It's the difference between getting a 1.1GB file (e.g. a 720p TV episode) in 3 minutes as opposed to 1hr 30mins.

Suffice to say, I haven't used torrents in a loooooooooooooong time for any practical downloading, though I do use them for distributing my own work, ironically enough.

 

[Scali]

Unfortunately, the problem with torrents is that they don't scale with download speed. I too only see about 200-400KB/sec on torrents, where as when I *USE* the *NET*, I get 6MB/sec.

Well, it all depends on supply and demand.
If there are enough peers and/or seeders, you can theoretically reach speeds of 6 MB/s or more.
My line does a maximum of about 1 MB/s, and I've reached that on various occassions, with popular torrents. The release of a new 3DMark is a good example.

But there is indeed the downside of impopular files or stale torrents, where it's hard to reach decent speeds, or in some cases even complete the download at all.

Another really annoying thing is people deliberately removing one block, so that people can never complete a download. They hope that people will continue to seed the file this way.

 

[RussSchultz]

I've also found that firewall configuration can vastly change your torrent experience (and negatively impact the functioning of your internet connection while 'in the cloud' if set up wrong).

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Then of course, there's the whole thing with how there are always people who are there strictly to leech and then you might have a lot of failed pieces because someone you were downloading from may just sign off suddenly... and then a few moments spent using x amount of bandwidth gets wasted. Similar things happen if an active piece gets dropped due to a timeout. This can happen just because the person has way too many pieces being downloaded and something may just be limiting them from being able to manage that many simultaneous transfers.

Indeed, there are ISPs -- some would argue that all ISPs in the US, at least -- which try to minimize the use of P2P serving of data by limiting how many simultaneous transfers are allowed per customer over most ports (though they may not limit it over HTTP/FTP), and if you're limited in that way, there's no way you can ever really reach your connection's max available speed.

The other aspect of it is that the bandwidth you get per transfer is generally pretty low since people are sharing their bandwidth over multiple peers, and the vast majority of people out there have asymmetric connections. The fastest transfer rate I've ever gotten from a single peer sending one block is only about 20 KB/sec. In general, the transfer rates per peer are anywhere from 1.5 KB/sec to about 12 KB/sec if I'm lucky. So even if you get a total sum bandwidth usage of 6 MB/sec, it's only because there are a lot of pieces coming your way at once. That doesn't really change the fact that each piece is coming at you very very slowly.

I've also found that firewall configuration can vastly change your torrent experience (and negatively impact the functioning of your internet connection while 'in the cloud' if set up wrong).

True, but the difference in a case like that is much larger than seeing only 200 KB/sec on a 6 MB/sec connection. 200 bytes/sec is more like it. Historically, I've seen that if the firewall doesn't have the right ports open, the speeds you'll get will never step outside the range of what you could achieve through a dial-up connection, no matter what your actual bandwidth limit is.

 

[digitalwanderer]

After a lot of serious tweaking I've gotten my torrents to come down at up to 1.8MB/s and upload at about 220kB/s....but that's on a 20/2MB/s internet connection.

 

[thehulk]

The really good stuff + high speeds are usually on private trackers with dedicated seeders using seedboxes.

 

[MfA]

The other aspect of it is that the bandwidth you get per transfer is generally pretty low since people are sharing their bandwidth over multiple peers, and the vast majority of people out there have asymmetric connections. The fastest transfer rate I've ever gotten from a single peer sending one block is only about 20 KB/sec. In general, the transfer rates per peer are anywhere from 1.5 KB/sec to about 12 KB/sec if I'm lucky.

Does bittorrent open a new connection per block or something?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Does bittorrent open a new connection per block or something?

Effectively, it all but has to do that. During actual transfer, you're basically receiving/sending multiple chunks through multiple separate peers. When you're seeding, you might potentially be sending the same chunk to 10 different people, but when you're receiving, you could well be receiving 10 different chunks from 10 different people, and when those are done, you don't necessarily know where and from whom the next chunk will be available, so you may get a different block from a seeder you already had been receiving from or it could be someone from whom you've never received a chunk.

With most BT clients, you can set limits on how many active connections you want at once, and similarly limit how many connections you can have to each peer and so on if you ever need to set limits on it.

 

[hoom]

http://www.allot.com/

In my neck of the woods these guys' products are rather popular amongst ISPs.

Being a small country at the arse end of the world, most of the internet exists a long way overseas & international bandwidth is expensive.
That means that nobody can afford to provide enough international bandwidth for unlimited plans at the sort of prices customers want to pay.

Even with data caps, peer to peer traffic wreaks havoc on peak period traffic if left alone.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah, many Japanese ISPs cap your line by default (100 Mbps FTTH) and actively prevent connections from being opened for anything it suspects is P2P. This also plays havok with some online games like Eve Online. Traditional downloads are still permitted at full speed, but P2P is basically neutered.

However, luckily enough many of them also allow you to turn it off manually through a web based interface. At least Flets did, although I believe some of the other big ISPs may not.

Regards,
SB