Bittorrent

[Valken]

I read through the source code recently out of curiosity and it seems to be 100% clean of spyware so don't worry about it.

The guy who created it seems more concerned with the concept of the whole thing than he does planting unwanted software on people's computers.

[Fusion]

yeh, thats good.

well, i got it before, and something must be wrong, because even if a torrent has over 80 seeds, im not downloading at anything more than 2Kb/s, which is atrocious considering im on 150k dsl (which isn't anything special i know, but 2kbps?). it sometimes jumps to about 6, but usually goes back down to 1 or 2 after a few seconds.

anyone experienced anything similar?

oh, and im using version 3.3 on WinXP, with Zone Alarm Pro allowing it.

[Valken]

That's odd, you should get about 14 or 15k...

What speed does it upload at for the same download?

[Fusion]

That's odd, you should get about 14 or 15k...

What speed does it upload at for the same download?

weird indeed. and it uploads at about 1kb/s.
i really can't see what the problem is - though im sure someone who's more knowledgeable on this kinda thing will know.

[Valken]

Well how long did you leave it for?

The download speed throttles up after a while... it may take longer with your slower connection.

[Vaipon]

yeah,bittorrent can take ages to get up to speed. I've seen it stuck on 0 for about 25 minutes before doing anything occasionally. Depends on loads of stuff. If it's really slow, try getting hold of another torrent file for whatever it is you are after. Might use a different tracker server which has more seeds/users.

[Valken]

Once you get a list of seeders/leechers the tracker isn't actually that important... So long as the same people (more or less) stay connected you'll still get the file if the tracker goes down AFTER you got peer info.

In short if it performs badly it's either a "badly" seeded file with a lot of demand and not enough bandwidth available or your connection isn't too hot.

That's the beauty of BitTorrent!

I have to say, from a computer geek point of view it's one of the greatest things EVER. So simple yet so well thought out, almost elegant, and an amazing way of distributing files without crippling a server's bandwidth.

Of course public trackers still use up a lot of bandwidth but when you imagine the terrabytes downloaded via BitTorrent in a month a 100GB's not that much is it?

I actually donated money to the author via paypal I like the idea so much. He's smarter than I'll ever be!

[Moodmon]

Bittorrent trial from Uni computer: 10Kb a second
Average Uni download: 300Kb a second
Best ever: 1.02Mb a second

That's incentive to not pirate stuff. Make the thing way too slow to be useable. Hoo hum. All I want is ruddy Full Metal Alchemist... ft:

[Vaipon]

I've had downloads off bittorrent going at ~80kB/sec in the past. Most stuff I grab from bt comes down at a reasonable speed. All depends on what you are downloading. The technology is sound, and is actually incredibly efficient at swarming downloads off hundreds of different sources. There is nothing wrong with bit-torrent. If you are getting **** download speeds, it's just because of how well/badly populated the file is that you are after.

[Valken]

I've got 512k ADSL and mine usually peak at between 45 and 50k which isn't that much lower than the 90% efficiency of ADSL in the first place.

Like Vaipon said it's not really bittorrent's fault but those who are sharing the files in the first place.

[Kirby]

BT can be very slow at times, but...

If you're getting slow speeds then make sure you are forwarding the Bit Torrent ports (6881-6999) to your PC. If you have a Firewall you will get slow speeds until you do, likewise if you're behind a NAT'd connection (router, uni etc) you'll need to open the ports up. Otherwise you will only be able to connect to a few people and speeds will be crap. If you're behind ICS then you're out of luck i'm afraid.

Get Shadows 3.3 Client as this will tell you whether you're seeing everyone, and also has some nifty features like upload speed throttling so your connection doesn't get saturated (BT will cripple connections unless you throttle to a few k/sec under your limit). If your connection light isn't usually green then you need either open and/or forward the Bit Torrent ports to your PC.

[Shez]

Kirby has just said what I was going to, only far more eloquently.

Fear the Yellow light

[Valken]

While I recognise the convenience of all the other clients that exist I still maintain that anyone who has problems with the original client simply have themselves or their connection to blame :P

[Vaipon]

While I recognise the convenience of all the other clients that exist I still maintain that anyone who has problems with the original client simply have themselves or their connection to blame :P

Yeah, I tried the Shadow Experimental client once. It had the fancy sliders to throttle the upstream, but it took precisely no notice whatsoever of that setting, and still went right ahead and munched every last drop of bandwidth available. Also tried one called ABC, and that crashed.

Switched back to the official client and just used command-line switches to do everything like speed throttling. It was faster downloading than the experimental one too. Sticking with this until someone produces a 3rd party one that's really revolutionary. I'm not saying they are all crap, just that I've had better results with the official one.

[Valken]

I think being able to see nothing more than a progress bar during downloads bother some people...

The ONLY feature it needs IMO is a simple way of showing if a torrent is seeded or not...


For windows there's a tool called TorrentSpy that does that and there's java based tools that can do it too for Mac/Unix clone users.