[ale] bittorrent gain?

[Jason Day]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 11:13:53AM -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> As I noted earlier, my download went up to 130+ KiB/s, unfortunately 
> it's now hovering around 7-10 KiB/s.  I don't see the gain in the tool, 
> personally.  I'll likely only use it when that's my only option.

The biggest gain, as James implied earlier, is for the distributor.  By
using bittorrent, Mandrake spreads the load, instead of having to supply
all the bandwidth.  Did anyone try to download
mozilla/firebird/thunderbird yesterday?  That's where using bittorrent
really helps.  The more people trying to download, the better the
performance.

Having said that, my experience has been much better, typically in the
range of ~300KB/s down.  It is possible that there just aren't a lot of
people seeding right now, which would make the downloads slower.  You
can help out with this by leaving your client running after the download
completes.  It won't help you, of course, but it will help others that
are trying to download.  You can also throttle the upload speed, so that
you don't saturate your link.

As for firewall issues, bittorrent will try to use port 6881 for inbound
connections, but will try incrementally higher ports up to 6889.  If
those ports are opened, you should get much better throughput.

See the FAQ for more info: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/FAQ.html

Also, read the introduction for some of the philosophy:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduction.html

Jason
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9