Re: bittorent on dialup
On 26. July 2004 at 12:10AM -0400,
Travis Crump <pretzalz@techhouse.org> wrote:
> Paul Johnson wrote:
> > csj <csj@zapo.net> writes:
> >
> > > A number of media files I want to download are available
> > > only on bittorrent format. I know about the advantages of
> > > bittorrent for broadband users with underutilized
> > > bandwidth. But I'm on dialup. My bandwidth gets saturated
> > > with a simple "wget -c linux.iso" (a 52K modem that feels
> > > more like 45K). So are there any disadvantages to using
> > > bittorent with a plain dialup line?
> >
> >
> > You will never finish the download. Your connection is too
> > slow.
>
> I routinely finish 200M-350M bittorrent downloads over dialup
> plus a 700M knoppix bittorrent download once.Granted it took a
> while, but as long as the torrent is popular enough that it
> will be available for a while it is doable.
Knoppix is "popular enough" that there are more than enough
speedy (for dialup users) ftp and http mirrors to download it
from. The one time I got the download wrong, I used rsync for
two hours. Does bittorrent come with a guarantee that the bits
I download are good?
> The biggest problems I've run into is that it saturates your
> connection much more 'effectively' than normal downloads, it
> sometimes dies when you lose your connection and needs to be
> restarted [which in turn will cause you to 'lose' a couple of
> megs since partial 'pieces' don't seem to resume], and your
> download rate will be about half that of a normal download [at
> best].
Does this mean the bittorrent upload rate equals the download
rate? This doesn't look good. A look at my ppp stats shows that
for the 159MB I downloaded this day, I sent out 4MB. This is
while downloading (ftp and http) two linux isos, a 27MB video
clip (mplayer), surfing (w3m text-mode), and sending out a few
emails (no attachments).
> But if it is your only source for the file...
Sadly it is (theora.org).
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