uTorrent To Build In Transfer-Throttling Ability 187
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."
reason 1 down. reason 2 in que. (Score:5, Insightful)
But is it working? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:reason 1 down. reason 2 in que. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:TCP regulating congestion (Score:1, Insightful)
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!"
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.
Re:god-fucking-awful summary (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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?
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:3, Insightful)
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 database would help a lot. There's easily obtainable databases of "AS" numbers that map IP ranges to organizations and/or countries, and embedding that into the client would also be a fairly simple exercise.
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:3, Insightful)
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 internal connections much more than external connections, ISPs wouldn't be financially motivated to monitor at all, because monitoring equipment is expensive. Right now, monitoring and throttling is worth it, because bittorrent tends to use external links the majority of the time.
In effect, improving efficiency would improve security.
route around the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a seedbox. :)
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:1, Insightful)
Your post is precisely what is wrong: It's all about what you get out of an individual download.
Not everything in the world is about directly maximizing YOUR OWN PERSONAL BENEFIT. More importantly, you can actually improve your own personal speeds by cooperating. Read up on the Tragedy of the Commons [wikipedia.org]. If many players all blindly try to maximize their personal utilization of a common resource, they all suffer as an aggregate.
This is particularly true of peer-to-peer protocols, which are ideally placed to utilize otherwise wasted local bandwidth. I've read papers that show that an efficiently designed P2P protocol can actually maximize the return on investment of a switched network, a feat that essentially no other type of protocol can achieve, largely because a well designed P2P protocol can minimize the amount of data flowing through inter-network or international links.
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Much bigger issue with uTorrent still unsolved (Score:3, Insightful)
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?