[ubuntu-uk] BitTorrent (was: Re: For all you BSG fans out there!)

[Tony Arnold]

Paul,

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 10:38 +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:

> > What do you mean by 'lack of control'? Just curious.
> ** end quote [Tony Arnold]
> 
> When I first looked into Bittorrent you could limit the amount of
> bandwidth it used, but not the amount of data transferred. I guess by
> limiting one you do have some element of control over the other, but not
> a lot. Also, from my first experiments, until you've shared a decent
> amount of files you don't get anywhere near the speed of download that
> you get with a straight download of a half decent server. I think my
> first attempt was with Debian, although I could be wrong. I set things
> up to download an ISO of around the 600M ish mark and left it over
> night. The initial speed estimated a download time of around 4 days, but
> I assumed that this would improve as things progressed and I was sharing
> out also. When I returned to it some 12 hours later it had downloaded
> around 25M and had improved the estimate to about a day and a half. That
> seemed to imply that you only managed to get a good download speed if
> you left your connection open 24/7 for others to use, and after a few
> days or weeks you would start to be seen as a good seed and hence get
> improved download speeds.

My experience has been better than that. Certainly at work, I've got
very good download speeds, but at home it has been pathetic. I
discovered my ISP (Pipex) throttles BitTorrent to about 20KB/s whereas a
full HTTP download will go at full speed.

I think there may be more to it than just whether you are a good seed or
not!

> I've just found that Opera seems to have a bittorrent client built in,
> so I'm going to experiment by opening up the required port, although
> it'll take a bit of configuration on my routers and firewalls to get it
> through to me now - not such a simple network setup as I used to have.

Azureus is regarded as the dogs wotsits of BitTorrent clients. I use the
Gnome BitTornado, but my requirements are fairly simple (i.e.,
downloading an ISO images of Ubuntu!)

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold