The Centralization of BitTorrent Networks

Writes writes writes writes "A group of graduate students from the University of Washington have posted a a new independent report about the extent of centralization in regards to BitTorrent communities. The report indicates that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active, even despite their large degree of centralization (and perhaps exposure/liability). Furthermore, the report attempts to determine if the torrent communities follow the 80/20 rule, by measuring the Long Tail of torrent distribution."

Comments

I belong...

[ImaLamer]

...to a few a Torrent "communities" and feel pretty safe.

First thing is that the communities don't share warez and big mpaa releases, just stuff you can't find elsewhere. Sure we are centralized but no one is going after people who share documentaries and obscure stand-up.

Are they?

Beware however... some torrent sites are selling out to scam artists. Take this site for example - they hosted DVD's to "Appz" and sold out. I assume it's now a MPAA dragnet.

80/20 rule

[Xugumad]

We (Distributed Systems group at the University of St. Andrews) presented a paper at PGNet 2004, available at:

http://distsyst.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/btpaper.pdf

which shows (Figure 10) that 75% of BitTorrent users don't upload as much as they download, or put another way, the majority of the uploaded data comes from 25% of the users. I don't have time to work out just how much of the data each section is responsible for, but the numbers are interestingly close to the 80/20 rule.

I don't have time to run the numbers right now, but I wouldn't be too suprised to find that 20% of users uploaded 80% of the data...

Re:BitTorrent's usefulness?

[Qzukk]

I find it to be the case more often than not

Yes, thanks to the TCP/IP protocol, this is the case more often than not.

Because the TCP/IP protocol requires you to ACK everything you download, if you cram your upstream pipe full of junk, your ACK packets are going to be delayed a nice long time, causing your download to stop while the other end wonders what happened to you.

Fixing this is as simple as limiting your upload rate. Or if you want to discover the internet as it was really meant to be on broadband, implement a Quality of Service setup that prioritizes ACK packets and watch in amazement as everything seems to go faster when under load.

Re:BitTorrent's usefulness?

[787style]

That's your problem - your upload was choking your download. Use a client like Shadow's Bittornado http://www.bittornado.com/ and throttle your upload speed.