| New Bittorrent Client "Maybe" Breaks Bittorrent? |
 |
 |
|
ArsTechnica is pointing out a new BT client, BitTyrant that operates a little differently from other torrent clients in that it prioritises connected users. The new client will check a users available upload speed and grant that user a higher download speed at the expense of other, slower clients. Ars proposes that this may damage the network. I propose the opposite. Consider this scenario. A new torrent is sent up to a tracker, and it's a gig or so, and the original seeder has only about 50Kb upstream to play with. Immediatly 10 peers connect to download this file. Now, lets suppose 5 of these peers are only able to upload at 10Kb, 4 more are able to upload at 25Kb and the last is able to upload at 100Kb. Now let's all suppose that all clients can download at 1Mbps. In a typical arrangement, there really is no priority given, so all 10 users are downloading at roughly 5Kbps. It would take a hell of a long time to finish the file. Using BitTyrant's scheme, the user with the beefy connection will get priority and will finish the download faster and will able to seed a full copy of the file faster, thus tripling the available upload speed to other peers. In other words, the guy with the fastest upload will be able to contribute more to the overall network faster than before and thereby speeding up the downloads to the original 9. I feel BitTyrant may very well be a good thing, or atleast a neutral thing. I don't, however, see it increasing download speeds by 70% as the author claims. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites          Add your comment
|
||||
