Re: bittorent on dialup
On 2004-07-26, csj penned:
> On 26. July 2004 at 12:10AM -0400, Travis Crump
> <pretzalz@techhouse.org> wrote:
>
>> Paul Johnson wrote:
>> > csj <csj@zapo.net> writes:
>> >
>
> 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?
Not directly that I know of; in many cases the torrent includes an md5
hash for the files, or you can download the md5 from elsewhere.
> 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).
Not necessarily. I've had extremely imbalanced rates in both
directions. Also, many clients allow you to restrict your upload rate
so that you don't saturate your connection.
Without having delved into the bittorrent source or documentation to any
real degree, I believe that the absolute rates you see are more a
function of supply vs. demand. It seems to me that your ability to
contribute by simultaneously uploading a torrent only matters when
there's more demand than supply -- in that case, those who are
contributing the most get the best results. It seems to me that, in
cases where there is enough supply to go around, you won't get choked.
But I have no hard evidence to back this belief up, and maybe someone
who knows the facts will correct me.
If I get a large file through bittorrent, I generally leave the client
open long enough to upload at least as much as I've leeched; it seems
like the right thing to do.
--
monique
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