Using bittorrent for large downloads (was: Re: DVD ISO files)

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

On Feb 22 2006, Peter Colton wrote:
> http is not a very good way of downloading large file. You would be
> better of using the torrent method.

This is definitely a good suggestion. More people should use bittorrent, because:

  * you are always "giving back" to the community when you use torrents;
  * your downloads tend to get faster, especially if you have a fat pipe
    and one of the peers can't sustain the upload speed to your place;
  * you put less load on the server and allow more people to have the
    software at the same time as you do;
  * it seems to be more reliable, as hash checks are made periodically
    for the pieces of files downloaded.

> One program for downloading torrent file is bittornado.

And another suggestion would be to use rtorrent, which is much less fat
than using bittornado, the original bittorrent client or azureus (which
needs a Java Virtual Machine environment to be run).

Since I like to be minimalistic with my choices of programs, I found
rtorrent to be perfect, as it is written in a compiled language and runs
in native speed---and both the memory and space consumptions are better
than those used by the clients that I cited above (sometimes by two
orders of magnitude).

And it is a nice motivation for using the "screen" program (also
packaged for Debian), just for the detach feature that it offers.


Hope this helps, Rogério Brito.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/