BitTorrent Beats Kazaa In Traffic Numbers

prostoalex writes "CacheLogic attempted to measure the peer-to-peer network traffic by installing their network monitoring tools in data centers of large ISPs. The results are in, and Bram Cohen's BitTorrent overtook Kazaa's FastTrack network. BitTorrent traffic amounted to 53% of all peer-to-peer traffic, according to CacheLogic. It's worth noting, though, that Kazaa traffic is highly seasonal, as a lot of high-schoolers and college students are simply on vacation this time of year."

Comments

How can they accurately measure it?

[hey]

I file trading is peer-to-peer (decentralized) how can some central "authority" know what's going on?

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[vDave420]

I file trading is peer-to-peer (decentralized) how can some central "authority" know what's going on?

Glad you asked.

The company I work for, FreePeers Inc, faced this same problem about 2 years ago.

At that time, I invented a statistics gathering scheme that took full advantage of the decentralized nature of p2p networks.

Previously, the client/server scheme was superimposed upon networks (see Limewire's network crawler, for instance, which contacts every node it can to count them).

My invention takes advantage of the nature of the network itself as a routing/aggregation tool to gather statistics for me,and let the results "ebb" thier way to our collector.

See the public results here.

Interesting to note is that we are running our aggregator node on a cable modem, and yet still get "round trip times" for measuring stats on the whole network of 5 minutes. This could even be reduced to about 2 minutes for our current network size.

In any case, the problem you describe (central counting of decentralized p2p info, such as network count or bytes transferred in a given time) is solved, and our company is awaiting a patent on it.

It does work well. We are running the aggregator on a 256Kbps cable modem (as I said above) but the BW usage is so rediculously low that it could be run on a dialup 56k modem, if only we had any in our office! With it we can accurately collect lots of good statistics about our network, and update it every 5 mins.

Each of those graphs in the linked to page is clickable, and will show more details.

-dave-

Use BearShare for all your p2p needs.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[jarich]

Use BearShare for all your p2p needs.

Doesn't bearshare still have spyware embedded?

From a quick google search

http://www.oit.duke.edu/ats/support/spyware/bearsh are.html

It would be interesting...

[AKAImBatman]

...if someone could plot legit traffic against "illegal" traffic. My guess is that BitTorrent would account for a much higher percentage of legitimate file traffic as pretty much anyone who has a large file (e.g. Linux Distros) uses BitTorrent to distribute it.

Bit Torent

[trotski]

No surprises here, bit torrent is far supperior to Kazaa in almost every way.

The only thing that needs to be improved with bit torrent is a merger of all the small tracker sites into one big site where you can hook on to any torrent out there. Suprnova.org is getting there but still, more momentum needs to be developed.

That being said, the best thing about the bit torrent technology is that it's almost impossible for the RIAA to control it. The cat is out of the bag and theres no way it will be pushed back in.

Re:Bit Torent

[LordLucless]

The only thing that needs to be improved with bit torrent is a merger of all the small tracker sites into one big site where you can hook on to any torrent out there. Suprnova.org is getting there but still, more momentum needs to be developed.

No, that doesn't fit with BitTorrents' (or rather, its creator's) stated aims. BitTorrent was not designed to replace P2P networks, but rather to allow the efficient downloading of a single file. BitTorrent is not designed to be hooked together into a massive network, it's designed to have an isolated little network for each file being downloaded.

IMO, the most important thing that needs to be done with BitTorrent, is moving the tracker out of the centre of a swarm. At the moment, each client downloads a metadata file from a trusted source, connects to a tracker to find peers, and then downloads data from the peers. If it wants to know about more peers, it re-queries the tracker. This gives any torrent 2 central points of failure: 1) the site distributing the metadata, 2) the tracker. Since metadata files are so small (and will become smaller with some modifications being worked on now - basically using a tree structure instead of a list to store hashes) finding multiple ways of hosting a metadata file isn't hard. A metadata file is basically a URL, with the addition of hashes to ensure data integrity.

Simple modifications have already been suggested that would allow a client to query peers for other peers, which would take some of the burden off the trackers. The advantage is more de-centralization of the tracker. The disadvantage is it's easier to poison a swarm with false peer information. Other modifications have been suggested which would allow a torrent to specificy multiple trackers, so if one went down, clients could query the second. The advantage here is redundancy, the disadvantage is that it could split the swarm, which benefits from being one large swarm more than many small ones. But nobody's yet come up with a way to fully decentralize the tracker, without losing its benefits.

The cat is out of the bag and theres no way it will be pushed back in.

This is even easier with BT than with Kazaa. BitTorrent, as mentioned above, has two central points of failure. Either could be taken down by legal means, just like napster. Moreover, BitTorrent was mostly designed for the distribution of large, legal files. Bram has already said he considers downloading illegal files over BitTorrent stupid, as it is trivial to see who is downloading what. It wasn't designed with anonymity in mind.

would be nice to see some detailed stats

[harlemjoe]

Does this also mean that there has been some kind of demographic shift too, along with the 'generational shift' from movies to music?

Also is this some kind of silent protest against gator style spyware embedded in Kazaa?

Or as RIAA tactics target one section of users using a particular P2P network (sic), they shift alleigances to another?

CNET article is nice but typically lacking on details...

Re:Well shit.

[Tremyl]

They're not the RIAA, but the MPAA does definately look at Bit Torerent. To be blunt, using BT for anything the MPAA has a copyright on while a college network is fairly dangerous. The MPAA seems to run robots which, as best I can tell, find BT servers and check the owner of the network. If it happens to be a school, they generate a nastygram and send it to the computer department, with not so pleasant consequences. This happened to me a few weeks ago, where I was getting a few episodes of Firefly (and uploading at a whooping kB/s, too!)

Direct Connect?

[Epistax]

I've never seen direct connect mentioned on any of these studies or warnings. Even when my school, RIT, got warned and passed the warnings on to the students, they only complained about Kazaa and not direct connect, despite the fact that it is much larger on campus. Is there some big thing about Kazaa that I'm missing? No matter how rare the item is that I'm looking for, I'm sure to find several people that have it. I've never seen a reason to use anything else (yet).

Re:MPAA monitors BitTorrent traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it actually illegal to have a torrent on your system and not the infringing material? I downloaded several torrents from supranova.org and most of the time I never bother to download the content itself.

P2P, Bit Torrent, Kazaa, DC++, Open Source

[Dark-Helmet]

think p2p is here to stay, and there are still features that need to be put in place univerally before it's mature, and all the various p2p flavors are comparable.

The various bits are there scattered across different p2p networks. IMNSHO, all p2p networks/clients ought to have:

-Swarming (as defined/used in BitTorrent)
-Privacy/anonymity (perhaps as much as in Freenet)
-Good searching (Kazaa, Napster, those types. With room for improvement all around)
-Open-source clients with no ads/spyware
-Decentralized/self-organizing networks (no central point of failure, or at least minimal)
-Browser/web server hooks to autoswarm web content (there ought to be bittorrent:// links)

Pardon my BitTorrent bias. I moderate the bittorrent_help mailing list, so I have more exposure to that.

All these features should someday be pushed into numerous language libraries, so that they become ubiquitous.

Re:Disturbing

[El Volio]

I would love for someone to explain to me how this isn't a violation of the Wiretap Act. Unless all the customers have given consent in the T&Cs, there would be a good case (for investigating this further. The exemptions for protecting the "rights or property" of the network provider don't really apply here, as courts have typically required a substantial nexus between the monitoring and the rights or property (think IDS on the DMZ). This sort of research project doesn't seem to fill that requirement, either.

Re:A bit misleading....

[Phybersyk0]

This might seem a bit incriminating, but...
Many trackers are starting to go private because of leeching. (suprnova.org has started doing this on some .torrents).

Some trackers will auto-ban your IP if your over-all ratio is less that 1:1 or 2:1. In some cases users themselves can elect to have an IP banned if they find a leech.

This is good as far as the private tracker goes, because whatever group running it can keep file distribution among its members quite clean, and on topic. For example mp3's are o.k. but warez are bad. or mp3's are o.k. but only if they're 320Kbps/VBR.

I personally use bittorrent as my try-before-you-buy CD purchasing station. I get an album, if I listen to it, if I like it, I buy it. If I don't it gets deleted.

I don't really understand why people would want to download movies though, because image quality means a lot to me. I guess it has to do with either being cheap, or poor. Or possibly for the same reason I stated above.

The only time i've used bittorrent "legitimately" was to download redhat 9, and that sucked so bad I switched to FTP.

If you're getting crappy download speeds and a resonable number of people are connected to the same torrent, maybe you should check your firewall settings.

P2P vs direct download??

[Tojosan]

Am I the only individual here on Slashdot that isn't using a P2P client on a regular basis????????

I've never been unable to get a demo I wanted from a legitimate source.

I don't download pirate videos or music.

I've d/l linux distros direct or at distro sites with no problem.

So, in a short answer, why is using a P2P client sooo much better? From the consumer side that is?

I've read the info at the Bittorrent site.

And just to ask my fellow Sd folks...how safe is it?

Thanks and be well!

Re:You want to blow this?

[bfg9000]

Too late, my friend. Too late. I knew BT's cover was blown when a couple of young kids from my wife's CHURCH asked me (the guy off in the corner in the OpenBSD Blowfish T-shirt with the actual algorithm on the back standing by himself and chain-drinking coffee) if *I* had heard of BitTorrent.

"It's kinda like Kazaa, but way cooler" the young pre-pimply punk in the orange hawaiian shirt said.

"Yeah, cooler", said his little brother, wearing an equally tacky spider-man shirt.

"Oh, F***!" I said.

There goes the neighbourhood.

And I need to stress, these weren't even REGULAR kids. These were CHURCH kids, the kind that's not allowed to listen to Hootie and the Blowfish because they're the Devil Music. The good thing that came out of it was that I convinced one of the kids to download Knoppix and give it a try.

I had no idea BT had blown up like that. I knew the Suprnova site went down all the time, but I didn't know they were getting ... child-dotted? I *TOLD* them not to put the damn comic books up.