jigdo

[Andrew Farris]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 18:37 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
>> A problem or two with bittorrent:
>>    IAPs don't particularly like it; some throttle peer2peer by various 
>> means, some who didn't are starting to charge for uploads.
>>   ADSL and (I think) are asymmetric protocols for exchange of data. It's 
>> predicated on the assumption users download more than upload. With 
>> bittorrent and the like, that's not so and it can cause bottlenecks that 
>> are bad for other users.
> 
> Actually ADSL is less affected than cable broadband, precisely because
> it limits upload speeds. The real problem with P2P at the moment is that
> ISPs are offering more than they can deliver, i.e. the relevant
> underlying assumption is that the user is only consuming bandwidth in
> occasional bursts, not continuously. P2P changes the equation, hence the
> current fight about throttling by some ISPs. Note that this is not so
> much a backbone problem as one of capacity of the last mile, and once
> again it's usually the cable users who are more affected because they
> have a shared medium.

Correct, cable is a shared medium that is not even close to symmetric (due to 
the technology design as content delivery originally rather than bidirectional), 
  and additionally is oversold absurdly by the cable networks in many areas. 
Its not an insurmountable problem, its a problem the networks are trying to 
postpone a solution for while attempting to maximize short term profit.  To top 
it off they are increasingly pushing more digital content and hd content which 
further stresses the problem; which is again because of a content delivery 
design paradigm which is *probably a bad idea* but still the current focus of 
future cable networks.

Even so, torrents are still effective for users on those networks when they are 
throttled to a low, but constant, and reasonable bandwidth.  Those bits moving 
do help the overall torrent network health and help deliver content to others... 
people just need to keep them moving slowly!  My desktop system, on a fairly 
badly clogged up cable network, has seeded over 6 Gb of the F9 Preview Live 
disks already... at no more than 20kbps at night and limited to 10kbps during 
the day.  When people download in bursts and upload in slow and consistent rates 
the whole situation is much easier handled by the networks.. and ultimately the 
people downloading still get high bandwidth from the torrent.

Its sad that over 3000 downloads of the i686 Preview Live disk have occurred 
through the fedora torrent but only 78 seeds are still active.  If even another 
200 users were letting their systems seed at 1kbps it would be so beneficial to 
everyone.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
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