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Today in P2P

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the state-of-the-art dept.

Hylton Jolliffe writes "I wanted to alert you to an article by research Marc Eisenstadt that digs deep into BitTorrent, its potential and limitations and its implications for podcasting, filesharing and more."

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about by burris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    BitTorrent requires tracker sites to handle all the partial-fragment-negotiation (think of the madness of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and you get an idea of the cool juggling that a tracker has to do).

    If he knew anything about BT, he would know that the tracker only introduces peers to each other. The tracker only knows which peers are finished and which aren't. Each peer then manages it's own "fragment-negotiation" which is really just downloading the rarest pieces from it's own point of view. There isn't any negotiation at all, really.

    burris

  2. Nova by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    HERE! is a torrent of torrents from the former Suprnova! Download and spread the word!

  3. add BitTorrent to http protocol by John+Macdonald · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As I visit yet another site to find it slashdotted, I find myself wishing that the basic http protocol included BitTorrent-like capability for basic web pages.


    Then, when a low volume, private site suddenly gets its 15 minutes of fame by being mentioned on Slashdot (or some other well-read news broadcast), it would automatically enlist the horde of new requesting sites to help distribute its content. The rest of the time, both before and after the flash mobbing period, it would just serve its own pages itself in the current manner.


    Since it is hard to predict which sites will be "discovered", it would be necessary for all standard servers and browsers support the http protocol extension, so this can't happen without a lot of coordinated work, I'm afraid. The protocol would have to be extended, web servers modified (Apache would e adaquate for a start), browsers modified (Mozilla/Firefox would be adequate for a start). When server was becoming overloaded it woud start by discarding requests from browsers that did not support the protocol, so that it can build up the initial seeding of helper sites. As long as there was more demand than available helpers, these old incapable browsers would continue to get ignored. Once a large enough group of capable helpers was built up to fully support itself, the group could start accepting requests from incapable browsers. That would provide incentive to upgrade older browsers.