BitTorrent not slow, but users are clueless

sean seanlkml at sympatico.ca
Wed Mar 22 11:18:48 UTC 2006


On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:44:47 +0100
Frank-Michael Fischer <hotmifi at compuserve.de> wrote:

> http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents/bordeaux-DVD-i386.torrent is
> just not functioning properly, there is something rotten, most likely
> with the ISP, where the torrent is hosted.

This doesn't seem very likely to be true; the amount of bandwidth
required between your client and the central torrent is minimal.  So
it would be surprising for a problem with its ISP to cause the
problem you're seeing.

> And it has nothing to do with
> my computer/networking skills, believe me. Otherwise the other five
> distros should be slow in BitTorrent download too, shouldn't they? But
> they all download at full speed (which is about 3Mbit/s) at latest two
> hours after announcement.

No, every torrent is different.  It all depends on many factors including
how many seeders there are, how many seeders there are with good 
connections to you etc.

> While I am typing this message I have running two BitTorrent test
> downloads of bordeaux-DVD-i386.torrent. Here are the current download
> rates: around 560kbit/s on one and around the same on the other line.
> One of the two providers guarantees even no port limitations whatsover
> in the service contract.

As a lark i started a bordeaux-DVD-i386.torrent myself fifteen minutes
ago, it's coming down at ~290KB/sec with a 5 hour completion estimate.
While not lightning fast, it's well within the acceptable range and not
too surprising considering the number of people currently downloading 
the torrent.

If you look at the stats for the DVD torrent (*) there have been about 25
terabytes transfered in about 44 hours under its control.   That sounds
pretty healthy.   Of course any particular member of the torrent can see 
a wide range of speeds depending on many factors including geographic 
location etc.

>From everything that I can tell by looking at the torrent stats and doing
my own tests, there is nothing wrong with the swarm itself.   That doesn't
mean everyone is going to be able to saturate their downlink with FC5.	

> So it is not very helpful to send "as an expert" plenty of mailing list
> member to fuzz around with their firewall-NAT-router-ports setup, when
> the bordeaux-DVD-i386.torrent is setup in a non-performing way.

It pays to have people deal with the most obvious and common source of 
problems before moving on to other possible problems.  Nine times out
of ten helping someone become connectable solves all the issues they're
complaining about.

Cheers,
Sean

* for torrent stats see:   http://torrent.fedoraproject.org:6969/




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