uTorrent To Build In Transfer-Throttling Ability
vintagepc writes "TorrentFreak reports that a redesign of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent allows clients to detect network congestion and automatically adjust the transfer rates, eliminating the interference with other Internet-enabled applications' traffic. In theory, the protocol senses congestion based on the time it takes for a packet to reach its destination, and by intelligent adjustments, should reduce network traffic without causing a major impact on download speeds and times. As said by Simon Morris (from TFA), 'The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does.' Furthermore, the revision is designed to eliminate the need for ISPs to deal with problems caused by excessive BitTorrent traffic on their networks, thereby saving them money and support costs. Apparently, the v2.0b client using this protocol is already being used widely, and no major problems have been reported."
I'm sure ISPs such as Comcast will find another reason to suggest they need in interfere with network management. just give them a little bit of time to put their heads together with the guys at RIAA.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
The summary says that the protocol is already out there, and "no major problems are reported." So how about "and congestion is being reduced, and here is how we know it?"
Currently hooked on AMP
THEIR arrogance is astounding? How about yours? They are working FOR FREE. You are merely complaining. Get your hands dirty and start doing some work yourself.
You can suggest things all you want, but once you start insulting someone for their free work, you've crossed a line. Nobody is forced to use their client. There are dozens of decent clients and probably hundreds of open source ones.
As for their choices, they will work on what's more important to them, I'm sure. Since they don't need this 'local' feature, they haven't got much incentive to actually work on it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
No bittorrent client picks one peer, and downloads everything from them... Instead, it connects to a large number of peers, and downloads from all of them.
If you can download from your neighbor 100X faster than you can download from someone across the planet... good. You'll get 100 chunks from your neighbor, for every 1 you get from the foreign country. No programming required.
There's ample opportunity for either to be equally fast. Crossing an ocean increase latency, but if the link isn't horribly oversubscribed, can provided speeds faster than you can handle. So, your neighbor might have 100 other people requesting the same torrent as you, for the same reasons, while the kid in Kazakhstan may have a great internet connection, which is barely being utilized, and this while international traffic is down. This is not international calling... you don't save money by not fully utilizing that transoceanic link.
Also, ISPs brought this on themselves. I've long advocated ISPs allowing unlimited speeds between subscribers, and only limiting the uplink speeds to whatever you've subscribed, but they almost never do. If they did, see above... any peer-to-peer protocol would naturally download almost everything from local sources, without any added intelligence on its part. You wouldn't have to write it in to every single app.
You could implement it easily, if you're willing to restrict yourself to neighboring network addresses in lieu of all else. If you want some fancy weighting to decide how important locality is versus absolute speed, completeness, etc. then you're talking about a major project.
Besides that... A good network admin could do the job in an hour as well, with no need to rewrite any of the applications.
That's baseless and utterly ridiculous.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
THEIR arrogance is astounding? How about yours? They are working FOR FREE. You are merely complaining. Get your hands dirty and start doing some work yourself.
You can suggest things all you want, but once you start insulting someone for their free work, you've crossed a line. Nobody is forced to use their client. There are dozens of decent clients and probably hundreds of open source ones.
As for their choices, they will work on what's more important to them, I'm sure. Since they don't need this 'local' feature, they haven't got much incentive to actually work on it.
First of all, they're not working for 'free', uTorrent is owned by BitTorrent Inc, a for-profit company. Initially it was free, but it's now developed by a corporation. Those devs are salaried employees.
More importantly, uTorrent depends on and uses infrastructure that is not free, by any stretch of the imagination. International links are $billions expensive.
So by your logic, just because a user can download their client for free, it gives Bittorent Inc carte blanche to do anything at all they want, including shit all over the internet infrastructure?
How the fuck does it make sense for a company who's product uses something like 30% of the total internet bandwidth to not make an hours worth of effort to minimize their impact on said infrastructure? Their product in its present state is so harmful that ISPs are buying millions of dollars worth of equipment to throttle it, and with good reason.
Read up on the Tragedy of the Commons and get a clue.
Compare their behavior to the largely free, open, and volunteer efforts of the dedicated people who worked on the early Internet protocols like DNS and NNTP. These were systems designed to scale, use bandwidth efficiently, and 'play nice'.
What happened since then? Why is it acceptable now to design a protocol that is maximally inefficient? Why would anyone support this kind of behavior?