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Comments: 187 +- Technology: uTorrent To Build In Transfer-Throttling Ability on Sunday November 01, @04:50PM
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vintagepc writes "TorrentFreak reports that a redesign of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent allows clients to detect network congestion and automatically adjust the transfer rates, eliminating the interference with other Internet-enabled applications' traffic. In theory, the protocol senses congestion based on the time it takes for a packet to reach its destination, and by intelligent adjustments, should reduce network traffic without causing a major impact on download speeds and times. As said by Simon Morris (from TFA), 'The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does.' Furthermore, the revision is designed to eliminate the need for ISPs to deal with problems caused by excessive BitTorrent traffic on their networks, thereby saving them money and support costs. Apparently, the v2.0b client using this protocol is already being used widely, and no major problems have been reported."
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reason 1 down. reason 2 in que. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:reason 1 down. reason 2 in que. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think this protocol will replace QoS on your local network - more likely, it will intelligently select peers based off of external network (Internet) factors
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Re:reason 1 down. reason 2 in que. (Score:5, Insightful)
I fear that you're right. With our luck, ACTA will probably kill net neutrality stone dead with provisions allowing for perhaps even mandating throttling by ISPs to protect various corporate interests regarding copyright law. The FCC's position on net neutrality supports this view strongly. Allowing for exceptions where activity is deemed illegal.
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Re:reason 1 down. reason 2 in que. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure ISPs such as Comcast will find another reason to suggest they need in interfere with network management. just give them a little bit of time to put their heads together with the guys at RIAA.
Really? I for one am certain that they will continue with the exact same rhetoric. It's a good scapegoat for them, and they don't have a problem with overlooking facts to avoid spending money.
Comcast: "No, we don't need to spend money to relieve congestion, the slowdown is all caused by bittorrent. We need to regulate it."
Us: "No it isn't, bittorrent isn't causing the problem, it's now self-regulating. The problem is on your end."
Comcast: "The slowdown is all caused by illegal bittorrent transfers! We need to regulate it!
Us: "No, see, here's a breakdown of traffic..."
Comcast" "THE SLOWDOWN IS ALL CAUSED BY ILLEGAL BITTORRENT TERRORISM! WE NEED TO REGULATE IT!"
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TCP regulating congestion (Score:2)
shouldn't TCP do that by itself?
Anyway, I consider this is a good thing, it'll probably increase goodput (less outdated, duplicate packets, preferring "closer" networks).
Re:TCP regulating congestion (Score:5, Interesting)
shouldn't TCP do that by itself?
Anyway, I consider this is a good thing, it'll probably increase goodput (less outdated, duplicate packets, preferring "closer" networks).
This is probably aimed at average BItTorrent users, i.e. they're on Windows. I highly doubt Windows has the wide variety of TCP congestion management protocols that are available in the Linux kernel. If I am wrong about that, please correct me as I had a really hard time confirming this for certain. It's not exactly a "common support question" that you can easily Google for, or maybe your Google-fu is stronger than mine. I think Windows uses an implementation of Reno and that's it. Hence, the need to build these features into the clients.
Then there's the issue that to a TCP congestion protocol, all traffic is likely to be equal in its eyes. It won't know that torrent traffic should receive lower priority whenever it conflicts with something else, VOIP apparently being the classic example. For that you need actual QoS. So the client itself will now measure latency to help determine this.
Also, I doubt this will eliminate an ISP's excuses for throttling traffic. In terms of bandwidth saturation and network capacity, I highly doubt your ISP really cares whether your BitTorrent client is fully saturating your upstream by itself, or whether it uses only the bandwidth that something else doesn't need. In either case, you'd be maxing out your upstream pipe which is what they might concern themselves about.
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Re:TCP regulating congestion (Score:5, Informative)
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Bittorrent spawns a huge number of connections. If the OS (or ISP) gives equal bandwidth to each TCP stream, your connection to youtube gets about as much as each one of your 25 bitorrent connections, which destroys the streaming video, voip, or even normal web surfing. I would LOVE it if this provides a solution. (I would be even happier if ToS flags were widely honored, but that has never happened, so I don't know why it would happen now).
I have heard the claim that the reason why ToS/QoS flags are not widely honored is that Windows, by default, sets the highest priority for ALL traffic with no regard for what kind of traffic it is. As I don't run Windows, I have to say I honestly don't know whether this is so. Can anyone affirm or deny this claim?
Re:TCP regulating congestion (Score:5, Informative)
Short answer, No. TCP doesn't back off until packets are lost. uTP looks for latency increases which happen before packet loss (and therefore, before TCP congestion control kicks in) and throttles itself preemptively. Put another way, TCP treats all senders as having an equal right to bandwidth. uTP doesn't want to assert an equal right to bandwidth, it wants to send and receive in the unused portion of the available connection.
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TCP Vegas? [wikipedia.org]
I remember reading how AT&T's iPhone "zero-packet-loss" was causing network congestion and 8-second ping times.
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Yes, uTP is like Vegas but it actually works on Windows.
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If you have the bandwidth and nothing else is requesting it, your torrents will fly.
Want to watch youtube HD on your low end consumer grade adsl, your torrents will slow and overall networking will still seem responsive.
When done viewing, BT will reclaim the bandwidth.
BT is not just aware of your hard coded BT app max settings, but also your OS networking demands and can adjust?
But is it working? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been using uTP for a couple of months now and I have to say it is excellent and is working for me quite well.
However, since uTorrent is backwards compatible with the original TCP bit torrent protocol the second I start sending to a client that doesn't support uTP my ping jumps from 20 to 200 or i have to go back to manually limiting my upload rate. Regardless, uTP works.
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Linux client? (Score:2)
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Are there any particular features that you particularly want uTorrent for, or are you just wanting it because you are already familiar with it in a Winwos environment?
There are a great many Linux native clients you could chose from and while many are text based (which might not be your cup of tea), such as the excellent rtorrent [rakshasa.no] which I tend to use, there are quite a few that are GUI based, of which deluge [deluge-torrent.org] seems very popular, or are GUI wrappers for working with text based clients (there are several such wr
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What is this story about? uTP, because it promises to reduce bittorrent interference with other apps on the network. From what I have gathered it is only offered by utorrent.
Ah sorry, I completely forgot the fact that rTorrent has become the "official" client since its purchase.
LAN performance also? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously though, this is a good thing. I don't know why the story is tagged "your rights online"
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You paid for that up bandwidth, use it
Clients already do this (Score:3, Interesting)
AFAIK most bittorent clients throttle connections already, some automatically like vuze, others like transmission only manually.
Or am i missing the point ?
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Re:Clients already do this (Score:5, Informative)
Most clients have you set a fixed upload speed. Some try to do this automatically, while most have you set it manually. This isn't perfect - if you set it to use 80% of your upload, and you are using more than 20%, things will get slow. If you use less than 20%, you'll have some amount idle and being wasted. Some rely on something like monitoring ping to some specific service.. if ping is higher, throttle back. If ping is low, increase speed. Again this isn't perfect because it relies on a single host and route to determine your speed.
uTorrent's new protocol requires no action from the user, no automatic bandwidth tests, and no outside service. It is designed to always use the optimal speed, while never interfering with foreground tasks.
It has been a while since I read it, and when I read it I was very very tired, but my understanding is that it tags each packet with a high-precision send time. So if we have two packets, A and B, A will sent at 100ms and B will be sent at 300ms. So you know they were sent 200ms apart. The _receiver_ then notices that he receives them 400ms apart, so there is 200ms of lag which means it should be throttled back. It tries to keep the amount of lag 50ms. Again, I could be completely wrong :D
Since it is based on UDP and not TCP, it also solves the problem of Comcast sending fake RST packets to make each client think they wanted to disconnect from eachother.
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You can throttle on your end, and your end only.
If you had say... Cable, and all your neighbours were active too, then this would make your speed drop. Your torrents choke their webpage browsing and youtube streaming, but with congestion control, it doesn't choke them as much. Is it perfect? Nope. Will it affect you negatively? Not really. I'd happily download 20% slower for 80ms ping instead of 2000ms. (and yes, it can get that bad when networks opt for low or no packet loss.)
When there is no congestion, i
Next: ISPs develop automatic throttling... (Score:2)
Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a much bigger issue with uTorrent that the developers seem to refuse to solve, or even acknowledge.
In essence, uTorrent connects to clients randomly, and makes no attempt to prioritize "nearby" clients. This may not be a huge issue for Americans, but everywhere else, you know, like the rest of the fucking planet, this is hugely inefficient, for both the end users, and most importantly, ISPs. This is why they're throttling bittorrent: because it tends to make connections to peers outside the ISP's internal network, which costs ISPs money. In Australia for example, international bandwidth is extremely limited and very expensive, but local bandwidth, even between ISPs, is essentially unlimited, high-speed, and often free or 'unmetered'.
What do you think is going to be faster: connecting to your neighbour through at the same fucking router, or some kid's home PC in Kazakhstan over 35 hops away? Even connections from here to America have to go through thousands of miles of fiber optic cable over an ocean.
Note that some other clients like Azureus have already implemented weighted peer choices, where peers with similar IP addresses are preferred over other peers. It's not hard. Heck, it's a trivial change to make, as no changes need to be made to the protocol itself. A reasonably competent programmer could implement this in an hour: simply take the user's own IP address, and then sort the IPs of potential peers by the number of prefix bits in common, then do a random selection from that list, weighted towards the best-matching end. How hard is that?
The arrogance of the uTorrent devs is simply staggering. They're a group of developers who could, with an hours effort, reduce international bandwidth usage by double-digit percentages and improve torrent download speeds by an order of magnitude, but they just... don't.
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Prefix bits do not indicate location. 2 Class C's can be a long way from each other geographically. Even if the entire Internet was broken down into Class C spaces, and you prioritised addresses in your Class C, I don't think you would see many hits. I mean, there may be 50k people on the torrent, but how many of them are in the same neighbourhood as you?
That's why the Vuze plugin uses a IP->location mapping database.
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Prefix bits do not indicate location. 2 Class C's can be a long way from each other geographically. Even if the entire Internet was broken down into Class C spaces, and you prioritised addresses in your Class C, I don't think you would see many hits. I mean, there may be 50k people on the torrent, but how many of them are in the same neighbourhood as you?
That's why the Vuze plugin uses a IP->location mapping database.
True, but it's still better than random. Many countries were allocated IP blocks from large ranges. Most of Australia's IP addresses start with prefixes around 200-something, for example. Similarly, most ISPs have large blocks allocated to them like /8 ranges or the like. Some ISPs are big enough that torrent users could have 10 or more connections to peers in the same ISP for reasonably common files like TV shows, and only need 1 or 2 to the outside world.
Still, you're correct, adding even a simple country
Proximity Favored Connections (Score:2, Interesting)
Ono Plug-In
You're absolutely right about how badly implemented the random client connection protocol is for BitTorrent clients. There is a project and a plug-in called Ono [northwestern.edu] for Vuze (formely Azureus) BitTorrent clients. I used it before to resolve this problem but I found that the non-stop creation of many ping.exe threads to analyze latency was causing some slow-downs on my own system and additional upstream congestion on my upstream limited broadband pipe.
I am still surprised that a better protocol for p
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:5, Insightful)
THEIR arrogance is astounding? How about yours? They are working FOR FREE. You are merely complaining. Get your hands dirty and start doing some work yourself.
You can suggest things all you want, but once you start insulting someone for their free work, you've crossed a line. Nobody is forced to use their client. There are dozens of decent clients and probably hundreds of open source ones.
As for their choices, they will work on what's more important to them, I'm sure. Since they don't need this 'local' feature, they haven't got much incentive to actually work on it.
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Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:4, Insightful)
THEIR arrogance is astounding? How about yours? They are working FOR FREE. You are merely complaining. Get your hands dirty and start doing some work yourself.
You can suggest things all you want, but once you start insulting someone for their free work, you've crossed a line. Nobody is forced to use their client. There are dozens of decent clients and probably hundreds of open source ones.
As for their choices, they will work on what's more important to them, I'm sure. Since they don't need this 'local' feature, they haven't got much incentive to actually work on it.
First of all, they're not working for 'free', uTorrent is owned by BitTorrent Inc, a for-profit company. Initially it was free, but it's now developed by a corporation. Those devs are salaried employees.
More importantly, uTorrent depends on and uses infrastructure that is not free, by any stretch of the imagination. International links are $billions expensive.
So by your logic, just because a user can download their client for free, it gives Bittorent Inc carte blanche to do anything at all they want, including shit all over the internet infrastructure?
How the fuck does it make sense for a company who's product uses something like 30% of the total internet bandwidth to not make an hours worth of effort to minimize their impact on said infrastructure? Their product in its present state is so harmful that ISPs are buying millions of dollars worth of equipment to throttle it, and with good reason.
Read up on the Tragedy of the Commons [wikipedia.org] and get a clue.
Compare their behavior to the largely free, open, and volunteer efforts of the dedicated people who worked on the early Internet protocols like DNS and NNTP. These were systems designed to scale, use bandwidth efficiently, and 'play nice'.
What happened since then? Why is it acceptable now to design a protocol that is maximally inefficient? Why would anyone support this kind of behavior?
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Get your hands dirty and start doing some work yourself.
Sure, where can I get the uTorrent source code so I can add this feature?
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Keeping traffic completely local would make it much easier to snag a bunch of file sharers in a massive "three strikes and you're out" campaign, don't you think? Since mere use of torrent software seems to be associated with illicit activity in the minds of the ignorant (ie. the authoRIAAties), I'm not sure that "I was just downloading the latest Ubuntu ISO" would be enough to avoid being threatened by the ISP. Lots of local inter-ISP torrent traffic might also cause them to alert local law enforcement to take a closer look. This could increase one's risk significantly, particularly if any 'infringing' content is ever shared (by an occasional, less enlightened, user of the connect, for example). Seems safer to not have to worry about local/non-local bandwidth, to be honest. Might be smarter to prefer connections that are as non-local and non-concentrated as possible. It's not always just about data transfer speed and bandwidth saving - there are other factors to consider.
[citation needed]
Keep in mind that in large part, the motivation of ISPs for monitoring or throttling bittorrent is not concerns over copyright violations, but the impact to their bottom line. All ISPs have three classes of links: Internal, peered, and external. They have a strong preference to maximize the utilization of the former over the latter, as internal links are effectively free and often underutilized, while external links are often very expensive and overloaded.
If torrent traffic utilized interna
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:5, Insightful)
No bittorrent client picks one peer, and downloads everything from them... Instead, it connects to a large number of peers, and downloads from all of them.
If you can download from your neighbor 100X faster than you can download from someone across the planet... good. You'll get 100 chunks from your neighbor, for every 1 you get from the foreign country. No programming required.
There's ample opportunity for either to be equally fast. Crossing an ocean increase latency, but if the link isn't horribly oversubscribed, can provided speeds faster than you can handle. So, your neighbor might have 100 other people requesting the same torrent as you, for the same reasons, while the kid in Kazakhstan may have a great internet connection, which is barely being utilized, and this while international traffic is down. This is not international calling... you don't save money by not fully utilizing that transoceanic link.
Also, ISPs brought this on themselves. I've long advocated ISPs allowing unlimited speeds between subscribers, and only limiting the uplink speeds to whatever you've subscribed, but they almost never do. If they did, see above... any peer-to-peer protocol would naturally download almost everything from local sources, without any added intelligence on its part. You wouldn't have to write it in to every single app.
You could implement it easily, if you're willing to restrict yourself to neighboring network addresses in lieu of all else. If you want some fancy weighting to decide how important locality is versus absolute speed, completeness, etc. then you're talking about a major project.
Besides that... A good network admin could do the job in an hour as well, with no need to rewrite any of the applications.
That's baseless and utterly ridiculous.
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You have utterly and totally failed to understand the content of my reply. I suggest you try again.
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I read your post and, at first, entirely agreed with it. However, what if the devs deliberately want to keep this problem amidst to perpetuate a reason for ISPs to finally upgrade their infrastructure before further optimizing how the protocol works?
That's quite a retarded suggestion. Upgrading the link with the bottleneck requires a lot of investment (putting a new intercontinental fiber-optic line in isn't the same as digging up a few streets) so the ISPs are quite right to try to put it off as long as they can. It's not underinvestment, it's trying to make the existing investment work for its living properly. And the thing is... it does work for most since most people's network access is sporadic. It's the bulk downloaders that are the problem from
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I agree, I see other peers on the same ISP as me and others on another ISP which the ISP are also based in the same city as me and yet it doesn't connect to them.
Coding a way so you can manually prioritise that peer or domain would be easy to do.
I see this all the time too. It shits me to no end that I could be connecting to users with 10Mbit uplinks in the same city, but uTorrent blindly connects to peers in places like Hungary which is almost precisely the furthest possible distance from me.
ISPs don't give a crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, the revision is designed to eliminate the need for ISPs to deal with problems caused by excessive BitTorrent traffic on their networks
How wrong this is. ISPs don't give a crap about this and it's never going to work.
1. They don't give a crap because the real reason they throttle is because they don't want you using your bandwidth. You know the bandwidth you actually paid for. Whether you are supposedly clogging up their pipe or not is not the point. The point is that you are using more bandwidth than another user and they could kick your ass and sell their internets to 1000 old ladies instead.
2. It's never going to work because of (1) and because the problem it's trying to solve was never a problem for the ISP it was always a problem for the end user anyway. You think that the ISPs have big download pipes and small upload limits like you do? They don't. Their shit is equilateral. You can stop clogging your tiny upload allocation as much as you want, it's never going to affect the ISP. They never had an UP shortage because they have equal up/down bandwith and provide you with tiny up limits. It may help the end user, but only if it's already better than existing solutions, which if you already know what your ISP castrates your up bandwidth to, it's not.
route around the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a seedbox. :)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
a) That's "The Fine Article", you insensitive clod!
b) You must be new here.
c) In light of b) Articles=bad. Summaries=good.
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Why can't it just be "the article" most of the time?
Someone forgot to RTFM...
Re:god-fucking-awful summary (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:god-fucking-awful summary (Score:4, Informative)
You have no clue what multicast is, do you? Please stop using that word until you get a fucking clue about what it is.
Hulu and Pandora are NOT multicast. If they were, it would put less of a strain on their networks.
I've owned an ISP and I can tell you, P2P applications like BT put a BIG strain on the network. You saying its a myth doesn't make it so. Just shows that your an idiot who talks out of his ass.
That being said, instead of bitching about network congestion like Comcast does, I would upgrade my network to keep up with the demand. I got a lot of customers that way. Long-term, its the better strategy.
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