Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Performance Test: Sync Is Faster Than Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox
An anonymous reader writes Now that its file synchronization tool has received a few updates, BitTorrent is going on the offensive against cloud-based storage services by showing off just how fast BitTorrent Sync can be. More specifically, the company conducted a test that shows Sync destroys Google Drive, Microsoft's OneDrive, and Dropbox. The company transferred a 1.36 GB MP4 video clip between two Apple MacBook Pros using two Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, the Time.gov site as a real-time clock, and the Internet connection at its headquarters (1 Gbps up/down). The timer started when the file transfer was initiated and then stopped once the file was fully synced and downloaded onto the receiving machine. Sync performed 8x faster than Google Drive, 11x faster than OneDrive, and 16x faster than Dropbox.
They are not designed to not use all of your bandwidth, it's that they can't. I've tested DropBox, and it breaks up the file into chunks and uploads them synchronously using REST calls. This meant my connection was constantly bouncing between 0% and 100%, causing bursts of packet-loss because it never gave TCP enough time to level out. BitTorrent on the other hand is great at not hosing my connection. I can run it near 100% and it will back-off as it detects latency going up, preempting the need for packet-loss to signal congestion.
Maybe because 3-4 people actually read the Sync blog post where it states, and I quote:
"Our tests were conducted over local LAN – on the same switch – in order to rule out available bandwidth as a limiting factor. It’s important here to note that Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive all rate-limit uploads and do not fully utilize the 1 Gbps bandwidth available (in regards to the office Internet connection, not the LAN switched). We’re confident that a slower Internet connection would yield similar results."
In other words, people agreed with me because they knew what I said to be true.
Not only did they give themselves the preferential treatment of same LAN, they also intentionally adjusted their tests to discount an advantage of a competitor. Again, quoted verbatum from the blog post:
"Dropbox has a deduplication scheme in place – what this meant for our tests is that even though we deleted the video file from our Dropbox folder, traces of it still remained and Dropbox got ~50% faster at transferring the same video file each subsequent time we uploaded it. To correct for this, we needed a new file that wasn’t bit-for-bit identical to the video file we previously transferred. "
Why don't you RTFA.
http://blog.bittorrent.com/201...