Azureus Decentralizes Bittorrent

BobPaul writes "While the eXeem project to decentralize Bittorrent remains in open beta, the Azureus Java Bittorrent project has recently released a major update that, among other things offers 'a distributed, decentralised database that can be used to track decentralised torrents. This permits both "trackerless" torrents and the maintenance of swarms where the tracker has become unavailable or where the torrent was removed from the tracker.' It doesn't contain the search functionality of eXeem, but it's also not a beta product and is licensed under the GPL. Could this and compatible clients be the replacement to SuprNova and Lokitorrents, or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?"

Comments

Torrent distribution

[Joakim A]

Torrents could be distributed in the swarms too. Possibly according to user preferences if the swarm has many torrents/many types of data. Could get really nice. We do need a python version though..

(Cant access the linked sites due to company policy (they allow /. :) so i don't know if this is supported.)

Re:Torrent distribution

[k98sven]

GNU Classpath and JamVM are smaller and faster than Suns JRE but they may not run Azureus yet.

No, JamVM (although extremly small ~200kB) isn't anywhere near as fast as the Sun JRE. JamVM is an interpreter, not a JIT VM. But it's fast as far as VMs go.

If you want a Classpath-based VM which is fast you should look at Jikes RVM or Kaffe, or perhaps consider compiling to native with GCJ.

Azureus uses native GUI widgets by way of the Eclipse SWT so if JamVM supports the required communication methods between VM and System alright, then it won't be too hard to run.

JamVM handles native calls without problems. I've run Eclipse and other SWT apps on it myself.

However, Azureus doesn't run on Classpath yet. It's very close to it.. But there's still one or two small issues with the Classpath libraries. If someone wants to help out with this, email the classpath list (classpath@gnu.org) or drop in on #classpath on FreeNode. You'll be 'liberating' Azureus and helping free java at the same time.

This is not anything new.

[solidox]

The bittorrent client BitComet has been doing this for a long time now.
Simply what it does is shares lists of peers between clients for matching infohashes...
It dosn't nessecerely decentralize it or remove the need for a tracker, as you need to get at least 1 ip from a member of the swarm (who has a compatible client)
It can help to get new peers if a tracker fails half way through, but you still need the initial peers ips from a tracker or similar.

em..

[Stu Charlton]

Let's get some perspective. 266MHz isn't "a year or two" ago, it's been SEVEN YEARS since Intel released the P2 @ 266mhz. I have a 233MHz from that era, and you can barely even run Firefox on it (IE runs "OK"). Furthermore, 1997-1998 would be the era of Java 1.1 and 1.2, which were significantly slower.

These days, and since the year 2000 with the release of Java 1.3, Java UI's have been very usable. And Java is much faster than Python; it's comparing mixed mode dynamic compilation (Java) vs. interpreted (Python)! Pysco's JIT release in 2003 may have sped things up somewhat, but it's far from mainstream.

As for running on a 266Mhz machine, what's "plenty" of Python apps? Were they all graphical? I think you'd find graphical Python to be pretty pokey (pyGTK or what have you). Command-line Java is pretty fast.