[NTLUG:Discuss] BitTorrent on Libranet

[Burton M. Strauss III]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org]On
> Behalf Of Robert Citek
> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 8:38 AM
> To: NTLUG Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] BitTorrent on Libranet
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, March 31, 2004, at 08:14  AM, Burton M. Strauss III wrote:
> > Note that community thing.  If you are talking about ISOs that will
> > not be
> > frequently downloaded, BT isn't the way to go.  BT works because
> > there's
> > always - 24x7 - a couple dozen or hundred people downloading
> > FedoraCore.  If
> > it's just one or two at a time, then the seed server will have to
> > shoulder
> > the entire load.
>
> That's what I wast thinking, too.  So, in the worst-case scenario,
> using a BT seed server is no worse than using an ftp/http server,
> right?  Or am I missing something?

Yes.  Issues are Efficiency and Overhead.

AFAIK, the download is broken into many small chunks.  For each one of
those, the downloaded .torrent file is used to find somebody who has it,
then a session is opened to that individual to download the chunk. So
there's a lot more session overhead w/ BT. (ftp/http - one setup then
suck...)

Plus if you have users downloading from remote sites, remember tcp/ip's
'slow-start', e.g. http://condor.depaul.edu/~jkristof/technotes/tcp.html (I
won't quote it here, see "4.1 Slow Start").

All in all, if you are on a slow network, BT could be much less efficient
than FTP/HTTP downloads.

-----Burton

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