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SUSE 10.1 Released
SolusSD writes "SUSE 10.1 was released today in both its fully open source version and its retail version. You can read up on changes with the version notes, and as always torrents are available."
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i posted a link to the torrent in hopes more people would start downloading it and speed up my download, but they (Zonk!!!) took it out of my story summary. :(
Here's the torrent for all 5 CDs (no DVD release, yet).
This release includes xgl support for KDE and gnome as well as several other nifty features!
You should be able to just download the netinst CD and use that to upgrade (remember to make a note of the server's IP address first (: ). Alternatively, you can change your sources in Yast to SL-10.1 from SL-10.0-OSS and use the system update thing. A clean install is generally safest if practical, though.
Assuming the pieces download sequentially, they would all have pieces that you already have
They don't download sequentially. Each torrent client chooses what parts to request, but the proper behavior (and the one implemented by most all clients) is to request "least available first". They take a look at all of the peers and seeds out there and pick the block that has the fewest existing copies, and request that one. In practice, of course, there isn't just one least-available block, so they randomly select from the set of least-available. I think (but am not sure) that they may also have a bias in favor of peers that aren't too busy.
But you're right that getting more to join in the swarm won't speed up the downloads of those already in the swarm. As the swarm grows, the total bandwidth increases, but it does so in proportion to the numbe of peers. If all of those peers are downloading, then the increase bandwidth just gets divided among the increased peers. Theoretically, this shouldn't reduce your incoming data rate, but in practice there is some inefficiency, so it does. As some of the peers finish, though, they stop consuming so the bandwidth per remaining downloader goes up.
That all assumes everyone has roughly equal pipes, which is true, on average. Mostly, everyone has fast download and slow upload speeds. When some peers with fast symmetric connections hop on, then your actual download speed will see a boost because they're increasing the average available bandwidth. So if you can get a bunch of peers with those connections to join in, you should do it. Getting a bunch more that have the same average upstream speed won't help, though.
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