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P2P Remains Dominant Protocol
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a press release was issued by Ellacotya that suggested something quite startling — HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic. However a new article from Slyck disputes this, and contends that P2P remains the bandwidth heavyweight."
Here I thought P2P was a class of applications, you know, ones that communicate peer to peer.
WTF. We can't even blame editors for this crap anymore, because they gave us the Firehose.
as much as everyone loves http traffic, its not going to overtake the likes of bittorrent traffic anytime soon (unless of course ISP's start blocking all P2P related traffic)
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic
That'll be because AJAX has lead to a massive increase in HTTP traffic. How much traffic do the Web 2.0 "applications" from Google alone generate, do you think?
Many people have been saying that Web 2.0 is an utterly wasteful way to do things. There's the proof. Now can we stop building Web 2.0 "applications", please?
P2P is not one protocol, but many. Some P2P systems, such as Gnutella, even use HTTP for file transfers.
A lot of P2P applications even uses http in one phase or another of its execution, what is the case of bittorrent clients communication with trackers, that is done over using http requests.
What they might be implying is that the so called "legitimate" traffic (casual WWW surfing) is outpacing filesharing. Ironically, this growing is due the popularization of tools that allow users to share the files via www, tools like Youtube and Flickr (and pornotube, *cough*) that they would share via P2P applications like Kazaa, Napster or IMesh.
Bottom line is: people don't care about the tools, but about the use they do to the tools. Nothing to see here, move along.
encrypted and anonymous distributed p2p protocol will dominate forever and anti-pirates will be assimilated
It'd be http based. Not for efficiency or any technical reason, but because it's the best camouflage.
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Ellacoya are well-known for selling routers optimised (and I use that word with the kind of looseness only Goatse man can convey) for bandwidth shaping, in particular for throttling P2P. PlusNet were one of the first ISPs in the UK to be hated for widespread deployment of their kit.
Remember, a press release is almost always marketing; and this form of marketing is about getting people to purcahse solutions for problems that don't quite exist as described. (Microsoft are good at this; Google are first rate.)
Youtube (and similar services) and trojans.
Both rely heavily on HTTP for data transfer. But then again, how do you measure that? By port? By header? Who keeps me from running a HTTP server on port 21? Who dictates that I must not wrap a package into a HTTP header so the corporate firewall doesn't get irate?
Generally, I doubt that you can reliably measure it. Especially with P2P services soon implementing a wrapper to fool anti net-neutrality laws and traffic shaping the various ISPs either will implement soon or employ already.
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