[geeks] BitTorrent fun

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Geoff.

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