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

[Paul Tansom]

** Tony Arnold <tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk> [2007-09-06 11:08]:
> 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!

There probably is, and I'd forgotten about throttling. I was with
Nildram at the time, and I think this was before Pipex took them over.
Things started going down hill fast for Nildram after Pipex took them
on, and now Tiscali are in the picture I am quite glad that I jumped
ship a few months ago. Although there's two stages to this process.
Stage one is moving to another ISP, and stage two is stopping your
previous ISP from charging you. So far, about 4 months down the line I
still haven't managed stage two, and it is amazing the lack of control
you have in stopping a company taking money from you these days! Nildram
have also told me that I shouldn't take anything I'm told verbally over
the phone as fact (i.e. going to happen) until I have it in writing,
which seem poor customer service to me, particularly when one of the
things they are telling me verbally (over the phone) is that they will
confirm things in writing!

Anyway, that's another issue altogether. The throttling issue does seem
to confirm that only providing something via BitTorrent cuts a good
number of people off from the download though.

> > 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!)

I moved on to Jigdo for my Debian downloads, which saved a good deal of
downloading when ISOs were refreshed. I've not looked into whether you
can do this now I've started using Ubuntu though.
** end quote [Tony Arnold]

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