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Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads?
Max Sayre writes "Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over? What about patches for your favorite games? World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients. So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS? Companies like Opera are including the downloading of torrents in their products already and extensions have been written for Firefox to download torrents in-browser. Every day Bittorrent traffic is growing. Sites like OpenBittorrent already exist and DHT doesn't even require a tracker. So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?"
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
Until then it's a tool for nerds to get their porn faster.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Why? because for small files (as I expect most software updates would be), downloading directly is quicker and safer.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Because Bittorrent has a reputation issue, for one. The MPAA and RIAA attack it and call it the reason they are losing money (instead of their failing business model).
Large companies don't want to have to deal with the previous hassle, and even though the load might not be much for individual computers, if everyone on a company network was bittorrenting, other traffic would be interrupted (even on 2MB DSL, bittorrent interferes with my connections to many popular IM services and I don't even run it full throttle during the day).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
No, it won't replace standard downloads, if nothing else because bittorrent is "best effort", and there's no guarantee that the client receives a file within a certain time frame. And for small and medium files, the overhead of BT severely slows down the access.
Yes, it's useful for large files. No, it's no 100% replacement.
And that's the beauty of internet in a nutshell -- there isn't one solution that fits all, but lots and lots of tools and standards that can be used and adjusted to the specific needs. So stop looking for The One And Only Way.
"...that is able to fully saturate your connection."
Yeah, like this always happens. Not.
Scenario: 1st day of release of a new popular file.
Either the vendor prepares well and works with content-delivery networks so you and everyone else on the planet can download the file while saturating your network, or vendor doesn't.
If he doesn't, everyone gets throttled and/or some people are told to try again later.
A torrent option would help distribute the load and cut out the bottleneck.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because for security updates, this allows users to find others who don't have the latest patches yet. Just imagine the people watching leecher IPs every time a new remote exploit is patched...
Isn't this what private trackers do already?
.torrent file)?
Yes, they require a server (tracker) to limit access to members only but that functionality would just be shifted to the social networking site.
If you're planning to do this without a tracker then how do you prevent people outside your friends list from joining the torrent (assuming they manage to find a copy of the
If you have friends list big enough to make bittorrent worth while it's quite likely that someone will leak the torrent file to someone they trust who may share it with someone else THEY trust etc, etc...
Bittorrent is great for very large files, and popular files.
But for small files it's really, really bad. Many linux patches involve downloading hundreds of small files, not one big one. Most applications are so small that the setup and teardown time for bittorrent would dwarf the download time. Any download that takes less than 5 will likely have a smoother user experience if it is not done using bittorrent.
Even ignoring tiny files, there is the issue of bandwidth limited users, the significantly higher routing requirements of bittorrent (many home routers flake out when you get 50+ TCP connections going through them), users with heavily asymmetrical connections (5Mbit down/256kbit up), and the more complicated configuration required to get a good bittorrent connection.
In short, bittorrent is nice for its niche (large, popular files), but outside that niche it is often not the best solution. Wider deployment of bittorrent technology would probably help some places, but it's not a silver bullet for all Internet downloads.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Contacting the tracker and getting an initial peer list, in a proper system, takes a fraction of a second. It's iteratively contacting peers, obtaining their piece bitmap, negotiating with them for piece exchange, and finding peers that actually have high bandwidth that makes the startup time of BitTorrent so high.
Not quite... The difference is that you could download from any or ALL of the trusted peers (currently known as "mirror sites") at the same time. Seems a bit better than trying to pick from a list of mirrors that might be close to you or using the "random mirror" link. If one mirror was down or slow, it would barely be noticed on the downloader's end.
Also, once a machine downloaded and installed the patch it could then announce back to the tracker that it can be a seed as it is no longer vulnerable. So, the tracker would only show seeds, and the downloading system would only announce that it was a seed AFTER it installed the patch.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Both FTP and HTTP can fetch at offsets other than 0 and ftp at least has been able to do that for well over two decades. I haven't had to start a download over in a long, long time.
-Matt
Just a heads up, this "game changer" is called a ftp server. My friends and family already have access to download my files or upload whatever.
Maybe what you want is a game changing facebook app that just manages passwords and opens a new window with your friends ftp server in it.
Why are you trying to reinvent the wheel?
But if the repositories were themselves seeding, then it'd work just fine: Worst case is that it's still at least as fast as HTTP or FTP from the same repository (plus or minus some BT overhead), all else being the same.
Best case is that there's several repositories all seeding the same basic set of random apps, plus a bunch of users who have already downloaded the random app, and things turn both faster and cheaper than they otherwise would have been.
The hash checks performed by BT will do well to prevent errors and/or poisoned apps, as well.
Sounds like a win to me.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yeah, but the built in download manager for Firefox sucks. Yes, it *can* resume... if you paused the download first. Even when it's told the file size, if your connection dies in the middle (which my connection too often does), it thinks it's "done" (which is absurd, because wget reports an error code) and you can't resume from within Firefox any more. Oh! I got an RST packet, that must mean that the last 300 MB transferred instantly!
I gave up on that piece of crap and used an add-on to make Firefox use wget, which at least has the decency to know when files have *actually* been fully downloaded, rather than giving up and deciding it's good enough to hand me a useless half file and no error messages at all. Seriously, have the devs never tested large downloads on a link that dies? It's not even hard to test: you can emulate the connection dying by pulling the damn ethernet cable. It just ignores the error and continues blindly. Does it really think that the other server going silent is an indicator that the file has been fully downloaded, or what?