Mike McCarty wrote:
Phil Schaffner wrote:
On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 16:02 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
It can give better effective bandwidth for you on the download by
getting data from a number of peers rather than from a single server
with limited IO capacity and bandwidth. It is also good form to
leave
your client open after the download finishes to "give back" to the
community by sharing your bandwidth.
Umm, lessee if I understand correctly. (The figures below are the
actual rates wget obtained for me when I downloaded the FC4 CD
ISOs.)
Seems it would depend on the number of peers operating, their aggregate
BW vs that available from a single dedicated server, your ISP's
limitations, the particular routing you are getting, load on the
server, .......
The operative word is "can" - YMMV.
Phil
As I said, my ADSL modem reports downstream connectivity at
894 Kbps or so. That corresponds to 110 KBps or so. I'm
actually getting 60-70 KBps download rate. That's pretty
much saturation, I think. I don't see how using more than
one source would increase the download rate, when my modem
is already just about saturated.
You didn't actually address whether my understanding be
correct.
Mike
Downloading it now will probably be fast from anywhere you get it but
the real advantage of BitTorrent is when a very popular file is first
released to the public. Where ftp/http servers would normally get
bogged down from tons of requests at once, downloads using BitTorrent
would be able to spread the file faster because it could use peers bandwith.
Use whatever method gets the file to you the quickest. With more people
using BitTorrent it offloads the bandwidth needed from some of the
ftp/http mirror sites which will give the users that prefer that route
more bandwidth too. BitTorrent is a win/win situation.
