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Bittorrent To Cause Internet Meltdown

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the packet-schmacket dept.

Gimble writes "Richard Bennett has an article at the Register claiming that a recent uTorrent decision to use UDP for file transfers to avoid ISP 'traffic management' restrictions will cause a meltdown of the internet reducing everybody's bandwidth to a quarter of their current value. Other folks have also expressed concern that this may not be the best thing for the internet."

2 of 872 comments (clear)

  1. Re:fairness by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're going to transfer files over UDP then you need to build some TCP-like protocol on top of it.

    Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine. That's just a consequence of the way Bittorrent works.

    However, one thing to realize about P2P is that because there are often dozens of active TCP connections transmitting from one machine, fairness goes pretty much out the window anyway.

    There's no reason in principle for this to be the case; obviously, metering of bandwidth should be by subscriber according to money paid, not by some arbitrary and easily manipulated value like number of open TCP connections.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  2. Re:fairness by nmg196 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine.

    No... you're getting confused between network packets (a kilobyte or two) and bittorrent's blocks (many kilobytes). Each bittorrent chunk is transferred using many network packets. If you're going to transfer those chunks using UDP, you need to sort out the packet order and do all the missing-packet checks and retries etc yourself. So you still DO need to build some kind of TCP-like protocol on top - even just for the error checking.