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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
Thus spake "Joe Abley" <[email protected]> If there was a big fast server in every ISP with a monstrous pile of disk which retrieved torrents automatically from a selection of popular RSS feeds, which kept seeding torrents for as long as there was interest and/or disk, and which had some rate shaping installed on the host such that traffic that wasn't on-net (e.g. to/from customers) or free (e.g. to/from peers) was rate-crippled, how far would that go to emulating this behaviour with existing live torrents? Every torrent indexing site I'm aware of has RSS feeds for newly-added torrents, categorized many different ways. Any ISP that wanted to set up such a service could do so _today_ with _existing_ tools. All that's missing is the budget and a go-ahead from the lawyers. Speaking from a technical perspective only, and ignoring the legal minefield. Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? If anybody has tried this, I'd be interested to hear whether on-net clients actually take advantage of the local monster seed, or whether they persist in pulling data from elsewhere. Clients pull data from everywhere that'll send it to them. The important thing is what percentage of the bits come from where. If I can reach local peers at 90kB/s and remote peers at 10kB/s, then local peers will end up accounting for 90% of the bits I download. Unfortunately, due to asymmetric connections, rate limiting, etc. it frequently turns out that remote peers perform better than local ones in today's consumer networks. Uploading doesn't work exactly the same way, but it's similar. During the leeching phase, clients will upload to a handful of peers that they get the best download rates from. However, the "optimistic unchoke" algorithm will lead to some bits heading off to poorer-performing peers. During the seeding phase, clients will upload to a handful of peers that they get the best _upload_ rates to, plus a few bits off to "optimistic unchoke" peers. Do I have hard data? No. Is there any reason to think real-world behavior doesn't match theory? No. I frequently stare at the "Peer" stats window on my BT client and it's doing exactly what Bram's original paper says it should be doing. That I get better transfer rates with people in Malaysia and Poland than with my next-door neighbor is the ISPs' fault, not Bram's. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
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