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Re: bittorent on dialup



On 2004-07-29, csj penned:
> On 28. July 2004 at 6:13PM -0600, "Monique Y. Mudama"
> <spam@bounceswoosh.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2004-07-26, csj penned:
>
> [...]
>
>> > 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.
>
> Is bittornado one of those many clients?  'apt-cache search' turns up
> only two Debian-packaged clients.  Also, would restricting the upload
> rate limit the download rate?

I'm using the bittorrent package.  Its man page shows these arguments:

       --max_uploads num
              Only allow num uploads at once (default 4)

       --max_upload_rate kbytes
	   maximum rate to upload at in kilobytes, 0 means no limit
	   (default 0)

I don't think the relationship between upload and download is direct.  I
think the download rate has more to do with scarcity and contribution --
ie, when there aren't many sources, the d/lers who contribute the most
to redistributing the file are those who get preference.  But again,
this is all my belief and I'm not exactly sure how it works.  I could be
totally wrong.  Why don't you find a few relatively small torrents and
test it out for yourself?

>> 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.
>
> I don't think it's right to suck up the bandwidth of the (dialup)
> ISP's other users more than is necessary to download what I have to
> download.

That's a good point, although I doubt there's typically a lot of
uploading going on in dial-up land.

-- 
monique

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