[geeks] BitTorrent fun

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com>
>Date: 2007/04/19 Thu AM 11:30:30 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] BitTorrent fun

>On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 11:06:43AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
>> BitTorrent amazes me sometimes... I would have expected the reverse
>> (i386 Desktop fastest, SPARC Server lowest) based on perceived
>> popularity... SPARC Server just finished, in 16 minutes!
>
>It depends upon many factors that I have observerd. One is the latency
>of your connection. Being 6,000-9,000 miles from most other leachers
>slows me down considerably. The processing time on my computer
>also is a factor. Switching from TorentFlux, which is written in PHP or
>PERL or something like that (the front end is in PHP, the torrent code,
>is in something similar) to rtorrent, really speeded things up for me.
>If you have enough CPU to support it, a PHP or Java client would not
>be problem, I don't.

BitTorrent's own client - haven't had a reason to switch (so  far)

>Another thing is upload speed. The more your upload speed, the faster your
>download to a point. My connection' maximum is around 25k bytes per second
>download and 500k bytes per second upload. Some torrents speed up when they
>get the full 25k, others are the same from 1k on up. 

After setting up port forwarding as mentioned previously, speeds went up dramatically (but honestly, 500K/sec is FAST in my book)...

>As for porularity, bear in mind that you are getting some portion of the
>maximum upload speed from each system feeding you. If there are few people
>being fed, you get more. If there are many, you get less. 

Makes you wonder who's downloading Ubunto SPARC Server...

>I rarely use bittorrent for things like Ubuntu. I usually get less than 
>100k bytes per second from torrent downloading them, often far less.
>A direct download from the local mirror at 3am gets me 400+K bytes
>per second. 

<Dave McGuire>
Time to move!
</Dave McGuire>

Lionel