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

"Prioritizing"

[zombietangelo]

IPs could, theoretically, be prioritized based on a database of known general geographies associated with certain digits. Just remember - prioritizing is one thing, but it's a slippery slope to peer exclusion.

Re:"Prioritizing"

[evanbd]

Just remember - prioritizing is one thing, but it's a slippery slope to peer exclusion.

Not really. Prioritize who you request data from, but not who you send it to. If all incoming requests are treated equally, but you only request from the optimal peers, you get all the benefits without any of the omgcensorship fud.

Why don't the ISPs help?

[PhrostyMcByte]

I've always wondered why ISPs can't give higher speeds if you stay within their network. You'd get your download faster. You'd use less peering bandwidth, costing the ISP less money. Everybody wins.

Re:Stop It

[Sparr0]

Prioritize by network topology is a better way to put it, that just happens to coincide with physical AND political geography in many cases. In the case where you can get 10Mb over a 10-hop connection, or 8Mb over a 3-hop connection, which do you pick? If you pick the latter, there is a good chance that two other users can utilize the other 70% of that 10-hop connection, making total throughput (theoretically) 24Mb.

Because it's a pointless thing to do

[Nick Ives]

If your ISPs international pipe is flooded then bittorrent will automatically prefer local peers as they'll be the only people who can send you data at a fast enough rate. If you notice local peers who you're not connected to then it's most likely just because they've already reached their connection limit.

Most bittorent clients will connect to many peers and try to saturate your downstream bandwidth. They don't care where in the world those peers are as long as they're fast. If, in your part of the world, local peers are faster then that means you should just automatically connect to more local peers.

Re:uTorrent

[Free the Cowards]

That just means that ws_ftp's GUI is a pile of shit, it doesn't mean that GUIs are inherently slow.