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20061004 Wednesday October 04, 2006

I don't get the attraction to bittorrent The other day Mandriva announced their new release, the 2007 version of their distribution.  I've been wanting to try their system out so I went to the download page.  A couple days prior I'd downloaded the RC2 ISO's and those were done with an FTP arrangement, but today the final bits are downloadable only with a bittorrent thingamajob.

Bittorrent is one of those gosh wow technologies that has the geeks glowing and saying it's the neatest thing since sliced bread.  Supposedly bittorrent is a technology that would, if deployed by the media companies etc, revolutionize the distribution of multimedia entertainment.

Well, as a user of this technology I am completely and totally underwhelmed.

The mandriva distribution .torrent file specifies the downloading of four ISO's plus a small number of related meta files.  I started the download yesterday afternoon, and 20 hours later the bittorrent client (qtorrent running on Ubuntu if that makes any difference) says it's only 50% downloaded, and there are 18 hours left to go.

Just a few days earlier when I was able to grab the prior ISO's using FTP they downloaded within an hour, and within two hours after that I had the ISO's burned to CD.

Seems to me that as a user of the two technologies, FTP (or HTTP "get" or the like) is superior over bittorrent, because I get quicker satisfaction.

So can someone explain the superiority of bittorrent?

Oh and to toss a few more worms into the pot ... Last year sometime I was curious what all the rage over the Azureus client was about.  So I installed it, ran it, and to get some .torrent files I found the torrentspy web site.  Good golly what a flashback to the unethical sharing of copyrighted content.  Is that what bittorrent normally used for?  The unethical sharing of copyrighted content?

(2006-10-04 11:10:10.0) Permalink Comments [6]

Comments:

If you had pulled the files over http or ftp direct from mandriva, they would be paying the whole bill for the bandwidth and it might have taken a whole lot longer for you if there wasn't enough capacity. With p2p type protocols, you get bits and pieces of the file from various sources near you, so potentially better for you and certainly better for their bandwidth bill. The fact that it was slower was likely because you didn't have enough peers with enough upstream to spare and that image available.

Posted by Mads on October 04, 2006 at 12:04 PM PDT #

Bittorrent, as with all P2P-type file sharing mechanisms, depends heavily on the number of participating users. So, if you participated in a torrent with few users, few seeders, and/or users and seeders with little bandwidth to share...well, the download will be slow.

However, if you hit a 'hot' torrent your download speeds will be astronomically high. High demand should equate to high speed. It just depends on the torrent and how many people want it at the same time. It also relies heavily on the 'honesty' of a participant in at least seeding the fully downloaded file for some period of time...they should at least distribute the same amount of data as they downloaded. Unfortunately, 'leechers' participating in the torrent don't always do this.

In regards to the content of torrents distributed....well, just like with any P2P sharing mechanism, content varies. There's plenty of valid content distributed via bittorrent, and there's plenty of illegal content distributed too. The way of the world.

Posted by Jay Millar on October 04, 2006 at 12:20 PM PDT #

Yup, that's the kind of ubergeek reasoning I've always seen regarding bittorrent. While it makes some logical sense, I am now 24 hours into a download that should have taken less than 1 hour and the client is claiming it still has 17 hours left. What an awful user experience. No matter how brilliant of the ubergeek reasoning why should the ubergeeks expect this to gain any acceptance. For me the takeaway of the Betamax versus VHS thing was that superior technology doesn't trump usability. And I did own a Beta VCR back in the day.

Posted by David Herron on October 04, 2006 at 02:31 PM PDT #

Do you have the BitTorrent ports open in your firewall for inbound traffic? Without that, the BitTorrent anti-leech scheme will slow down your downloads. And if qtorrent is the built-in Ubuntu torrent client, it pretty much sucks IMHO -- Azureus is much better.

Posted by Mark Murphy on October 04, 2006 at 06:21 PM PDT #

Your experience differs from most others' with respect to Linux ISOs. Generally speaking, those are hosted well enough to be *very* fast. I'm guessing, as Mark is, that you don't have your firewall set up properly.

Posted by Dan Mick on October 04, 2006 at 08:37 PM PDT #

Plus, ISPs have a habit of throttling BitTorrent traffic anyway, so no matter how many peers you have, FTP usually works out miles quicker. Don't think I've ever downloaded anything via BT in less than 12 hours.

Posted by 213.202.157.99 on October 05, 2006 at 04:04 PM PDT #

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