P2p fads come and go, do you think BitTorrent is offering something more than other p2p clients ?

Uh, speed?

Not only speed, but speed even during times when everyone is trying to download the file at the same time, which is its best feature, IMHO.

I started this thread in light of this article:
http://news.com.com/Survey%3A+Movie-...l?tag=nefd.hed

In my own experience (on windows, unable to use linux online at the mo) ive had nothing but poor download speeds (yes whilst sharing) and the overall speed of windows is significantly decreased. Secondly i really dislike:

-Its poor design. Torrents can only be minimisied to the task bar, i dont want a cluttered taskbar. Presumably its the same in linux ??

-No control over bandwidth, (not reducing upload bw but having the control to give different torrents prority).

-Orphan torrents.

Where bittorent reallly excels is distributing large amounts of data from http servers, ie linux distros and other software. In this respect it is preferable to http/ftp transfer. And in many cases may be the reason why it seems more used than kazaa, actual files transferred is very different to packets transferred.

Personally i beleive that bitTorrent will dominate over other methods of transfer for legitimate (legal) content, even though it needs polishing up a lot. I cant see it taking a significant market share from the gnutella cleints in what they've always done best, mp3, avis and warez, specially considering how much effort it is to search for torrents.

Well I think your experience must be lacking. In case you didn't know there are many (10s of) bit torrent clients that give you advanced control over bandwidth (not sure about downloading, but uploading definitely), detailed output of the status of your transfer and your connection speed with individual clients, and advanced active torrent management so you won't get your cluttered task bar. As for your speed, it depends on if you have a firewall active (if you do your speed will be slowed significantly unless you open up the BT ports), how many people are seeding the file, and what the connection speed is for everyone active on the torrent. Even if you have a 1GB bandwidth, if there is one seed and one other downloader both on 56Kbps modems, you're not going to be getting that file very quickly.

Download Shadow's Experimental Bittorent client. That allows for you to control the upload bandwidth. Also, it minimizes to the system try rather than the task bar.

Not all downloads will be screamers. Remember, you can only receive files as fast as people are sending. Generally speaking, the more people downloading a torrent the faster it is. I downloaded Slackware 10 ISOs at around 350KB/sec. You can't beat that with a stick.

As a proof of concept, I'd like to give my personal records for upload and download speed with bit torrent.

Upload Record - 2603 kB/s

Download Record - 1412 kB/s

DISCLAIMER: Both files were then American-unlicensed foreign material, so there

Yeh, bittorrent will die, no one uses it
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...tid=95&tid=126

I think BitTorrent really sucked. I tried to get slackware ISO's from there and it was downloading at 20 kb/sec and it never went higher. I downloaded off of a ftp and I get speeds of 340 kb/sec so you tell me what is better.

Just because you got a couple files faster from an FTP server doesn't mean that FTP always wins over BT. The downfalls of FTP are:

1) Servers often have a user cap, completely barring you from your download
2) Since all outgoing traffic originates from one machine, a lot of users downloading at the same time can really slow down your transfer rate
3) Not all FTP servers are public, many are private
4) IMO, its harder to find the file you want with FTP than with BT. Especially if its multimedia

I downloaded my distro from an FTP server as well, but that's because there are so many dedicated servers across the world, so you can always find one close to your location. I rarely use FTP to find music, movie clips, etc. though.

BT=garbage

Why? Because you dont need to upload anything at all to download at full speed which defeats the point of BT(Think Azureus). Second the amount of garbage traffic from 200 other people each sending packets at 1kb/s is awful on networks and results in a lot of collisions. Which is why you will find BT to be blocked on campus networks while they will allow other p2p program such as limewire, kazaa etc... Third BT is a ressource whore. Keeping track of 200+ open ports takes its toll.

FTP wins over BT for the simple reason that it only requires on TCP connection and is a lot lighter on the processor than BT. Oh and no pre-allocation works wonders. FTP is nearly as old as TCP it isnt going anywhere and people will continue using it since it's simplicity and elegance can not be matched.

I think i should really have checked out some bitTorrent clients before passing judgement on the interface and lack of control etc, but after poor download results and my girlfriend complaining that her windows box had crawled to halt it was not the first thing on my mind.

Stack, you have a very valid point. I read on the bitTorrent site that prioity is given to those sharing a resource but its quite normal to have nothing to share but chunks of what you have already downloaded. When dl'ing a distro i found the download speed to be on average a third of the upload speed - i have gone back to ftp for downloading distributions.

And btw the article does not state that more people are using bitTorrent just that more data packets were associated with biTorent rather than other p2p.

yah a lot more!

I think it is a great idea, just not well implemented. (as in the point about not having to upload to download...) I have gotten awesome speeds from BT, and you are wrong in the fact that it is awful on networks. Maybe on private nets, but not on the Internet as a whole as it spreads the traffic around and doesn't have it all coming out of one particular router, and so forth. But to say 'garbage' is rather a generalized statement, and I have to disagree.

Collisions???



bc

BT is most effective for large-sized, high-demand files. Lower the demand and it's limited by the upload speed of the host/seed, just like any other method. BT just makes the number of connections potentially infinite (for better or for worse.) It's only good for what it was designed for.