Making BitTorrent Clients Prioritize By Geography?

Daengbo writes "While I live in S.Korea and have virtually unlimited bandwidth in and out of the country, not all my Asian friends are so lucky. Many of the SE Asian and African countries have small international pipes. Even when a user has a high-speed local connection, downloads from abroad will trickle in. Bittorrent clients apparently don't prioritize other users on the same ISP or at least in the same country. Why is that? Is it difficult to manage? If I were to write a plug-in for, say, Deluge, what hurdles would I be likely to come across? If this functionality is available in other clients or through plug-ins, please chime in."

Comments

Azereus already has a plugin for this

[dave562]

There is already a plugin for Azereus that does this. I downloaded it about a year ago. I'm at work right now or otherwise I would look at my installation and tell you the exact name of it.

Re:Azereus already has a plugin for this

[LSD-OBS]

Is that the same plugin that constantly runs a barrage of pings in a hidden shell? Can't remember the name, but I ran a similar sounding plugin and didn't see much speed improvement but it sure did chew up my CPU.

Re:Azereus already has a plugin for this

[dave562]

It probably is the same one. I seem to remember that it was developed as part of a university project. I probably even read about it right here on /. I never checked the background activity so I can't comment on the barrage of pings. I do recall that it didn't make much of a difference in my torrent speeds. I'm on DSL at home and always get consistently good torrent performance.

Re:Azereus already has a plugin for this

[mark_hill97]

It is called Ono and it can be found here

uTorrent

[SpitfireSMS]

uTorrent has a feature called local peer discovery that does that exactly. It was even able to discover other people at my university sharing the files.

Re:uTorrent

[X0563511]

rtorrent

Re:uTorrent

[F�an�ro]

Local peer Discovery works only within a lan, the corresponding broadcast messages are not routed over the internet

Re:uTorrent

[MSZ]

export PS1="god#" does not make you root.

Ono

[pythonax]

There is a plugin for Vuze (formerly Azureus) called Ono which does exactly that. Not sure what the problems they ran into, but as it is a college project I am sure they would be willing to discuss some of it with you. http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/Ono.html

Already Made "Ono"

[StarWreck]

What you're looking for is an Azureus plugin called "Ono". It prioritized based on router hops. Theoretically, this would make those connected to the same ISP preffered. After that it would make ISP's with direct connections to your ISP preferred. After that, resonably close geographically, ie same country.

Re:Already Made "Ono"

[drchoffnes]

For the record, it's not quite based on router hops. Ono exploits CDN redirections for very efficient peer baising. You can find the technical details here: http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/publications/DChoffnes08Sigcomm.html Also, if you want to restrict biasing to a custom set of IP address blocks, Ono now supports "manual peer biasing" toward those blocks. A description of how to use this feature (tailored for Kiwis) is here: http://homepages.xnet.co.nz/~createcoms/

For Vuze, there's Ono and P4P

[chrysrobyn]

For Vuze, formerly Azureus, there are Ono and P4P, which should do what you're looking for, although for different reasons. Unfortunately, they both rely on people in your region being interested in the same torrents you are, while P4P additionally benefits from an iTracker, an ISP provided tracker that's topology aware (they did some work to prioritize based on ping latency, using that as a distance estimate, but I don't know if it's a fallback mechanism). Due to the iTracker infrastructure and possibly conflicting supporters, there are some privacy concerns.

Geolocation libraries

[VGPowerlord]

"Bittorrent clients apparently don't prioritize other users on the same ISP or at least in the same country. Why is that? Is it difficult to manage?"
The reason BitTorrent doesn't prioritize other users on the same ISP or the same country is that it doesn't know which ones are part of the same ISP or the same country. For ISPs, since the introduction of CIDR addresses, ISPs can have multiple blocks of IPs. Can you honestly tell me what all of, say, Comcast's IP blocks are with any degree of certainty?

For countries, you either need to know which IP blocks IANA has allocated to which IP registry or use a geolocation library.

MaxMind's GeoIP seems to be the de facto geolocation library, but they charge money for the "good" version. There is a free version now, but it has some annoying requirements, such as having to include "This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://maxmind.com/" in all advertising materials and documentation. It also only has a 99.5% accuracy as claimed by its creators, which means the the accuracy is probably considerably lower than they claim. Even if it were 99.5%, that means it's wrong for 1 out of every 200 people.

Re:Non-geo-ip

[VGPowerlord]

That doesn't work well with networks split with CIDR. For example, the 24.x.y.z block is in the Class A address range, but it's not a class A block.

Tune your TCP Receive Window first

[WinDev]

The biggest speed issue facing Asia/Australia is the latency of traffic to the rest of the planet. The (Windows) TCP Receive Window is tuned too small for the distances required. If you change the receive window to the maximum, you can get 4x more data in the same period using any client (P2P, browsers, etc...).

Refer to:
http://cable-dsl.navasgroup.com/index.htm#IncreasingWindow

Re:Won't work

[Andy Dodd]

Look at it from a different perspective - 100 people want one file of size A megabytes, and you start with one person seeding.

With classic unicast distribution, 100*A needs to be sent by that one person.

With P2P, much less needs to be sent, but still 100*A needs to traverse the network. It may or may not traverse fewer hops - it may in fact traverse more.

With multicast, A megabytes leave the single origin, and that gets multipled by routers as needed in the most efficient manner. In the end, the least amount of data needs to be sent in order for everyone to achieve completion. Yes, in the short term the network load will probably not be reduced much, but the time that high load occurs for will be far less before everyone has the file and there is little need for lots of bandwidth.