On 25/04/2008, Tyrion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Nicholas Wheeler wrote: > > I just downloaded the i386 desktop iso in 7 minutes via torrents. I'm > > glad torrent speeds are exceedingly fast. > > I'm trying so hard to understand how torrents work, but it seems to be > some PFM at work here. Why is it I'll get different speeds for the same > torrent when using different clients?
I'm not sure what you mean by PFM, but I'll do my best to answer your questions. Firstly, the differing speeds in different clients is probably because you're doing the download at different times. The landscape of P2P availability is constantly changing as people connect and disconnect to/from the web of sharers. However, different clients may have different defautl settings (discussed below). > And why does it only say > downloading from 3 of 5 peers when there are thousands of seeders > listed? Do I just have something set up wrong? It could be a client configuration issue that only conencts to a certain number of sharers per torrent (or total across all torrents). However, it's also possible that downloading from less than the total available number of peers saturates your available downstream bandwidth, or that the tracker is making sure to only give you the connections that are most reliable and/or closest in proximity to your current location. In addition, where did you see the number of seeders listed? If it was on the Web site where you found the .torrent file, those results are usually pretty stale. > I have the ports > forwarded as recommended, I've tried bittorrent, bittornado, > transmission ans azureus. Azureus seems to have some decent speeds for > now, but so did transmission when I first started using it. Again, the speed issue is largely a function of how much of the file is available. It's possible to have great speeds when you start a torrent since everybody connected has some portion of it, but many torrents have certain pieces of the file present in a limited number of places (usually caused by people closing the torrent before they've seeded it enough). In fact, I've run into several torrents where only a portion of the file is actually available despite several peers: people will full copies of the file (or, the only ones with the missing pieces) had dropped out. > What am I missing here? I've read what I can find online and things > don't seem to work the way they are described. P2P is great for bandwith and distribution costs, but for the end-users the file is often only fully available following its initial release. Too many selfish downloaders, and the system degrades to the point of unusability. Thus, the creation of authenticated trackers (like tvtorrents.com) that keep track of your total seeding ratio and make sure you stay on the positive side if you want to keep using the service. In any case, Linux distribution torrents are usually pretty well seeded, as the open-source ethos lends itself to being more generous with one upstream bandwidth. That, and people like me who keep torrents seeding on their servers for a while after the download is finished... I dare say that non-Linux folk are much less likely to have always-on server machines. -- Brad Beyenhof http://augmentedfourth.com Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. ~ Sydney Smith, English essayist (1771-1845) -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
