Examining Bittorrent

ToyKeeper and other wrote in with this: "The Register published a detailed analysis of BitTorrent traffic and user habits today, focusing on four aspects: availability, integrity, download speeds, and ability to withstand flash crowds. BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why. Also included are data about torrent lifetime, network poisoning, response during downtime or attacks, and lots of pretty charts. A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems." The original paper (pdf) is available.

Comments

Re:How would you measure such a thing?

[kayen_telva]

amazing, moderated interesting for not RTFA.

Re:Religious nut

[Minna Kirai]

Atheism [reference.com] is a belief system as much as Christianity. It is an unwavering belief that there is NO God.

Hey, next time try READING the dictionary link you provided. That way maybe you can correctly repeat the contents of one single sentence. Here it is:

1. One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

This might require some tough thinking, but notice how it can mean EITHER active denial, OR just disbelief? Disbelief means you don't believe, but it doesn't imply you've ever even considered the idea. 100% of people less than 2 years old are atheists, since they haven't even heard (or comprehended) the concept of "God" yet.

To be agnostic is to assume a question such as God is unknowable by human mind, so is irrelevant.

All agnostics are also atheists. They don't believe in God... the fact that they're not quite about it doesn't change the fact that they don't believe in God.

Re:Slashdot effect salve

[Doc Ruby]

"Disclaimer: When i'm not studying EE, IAABCD (I _am_ a BitTorrent Client Developer)."

That is an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy, cloaked in a "disclaimer" that makes claims. My reply, directly to your disclaimer, pointed out something that I have learned in my own engineering studies - almost all of which have been on the job, in a career so successful that I retired last decade.

Then your actual comment starts off with

"Why does this keep coming up? no, No and NO!"

and you get your own "pro hominem" (if not quite strictly "ad hominem"; maybe "contra hominem") attack into the mix:

"It's stupid to even think about trying to distribute any kind of dynamic content over BT."

I agree that miscommunications happen - clearly it's happened here, and we've both got something to learn about using Slashdot posts to critically analyze P2P protocols, at least. BTW, sometimes I am a raving loon, so I don't take things too personally :).

To the matter at hand, you do point out some essential BT features/requirements that make it inappropriate as the Web cache I proposed. I, too, pointed out reasons why BT won't work for this, and even phrased my proposal in the wishful thinking terms of "asking Santa". Other posters in the thread mentioned Coral, also limited in its current design, to which I responded with an approach to make it work.

I appreciate the work you're doing. Those actual app releases, rather than just armchair architecture in Slashdot posts, have brought P2P/swarm tech to actually do amazingly useful things. That's why I'm so excited about using some kind of swarm tech, rather than some other approach that either won't work, or is vaporware, to solve one of the World Wide Wait's main problems: centralized server bottlenecks (Slashdot effect). Hopefully we can constructively design and develop these bigger aftershocks of the Web quake together, as a community. Better communication is what it's all about - I don't want just to post to Slashdot forums in a Web form forever, pissing off fellow developers :).