Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? 591
Max Sayre writes "Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over? What about patches for your favorite games? World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients. So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS? Companies like Opera are including the downloading of torrents in their products already and extensions have been written for Firefox to download torrents in-browser. Every day Bittorrent traffic is growing. Sites like OpenBittorrent already exist and DHT doesn't even require a tracker. So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?"
You explained it. (Score:4, Insightful)
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
Until then it's a tool for nerds to get their porn faster.
File size (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? because for small files (as I expect most software updates would be), downloading directly is quicker and safer.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Bittorrent has a reputation issue, for one. The MPAA and RIAA attack it and call it the reason they are losing money (instead of their failing business model).
Large companies don't want to have to deal with the previous hassle, and even though the load might not be much for individual computers, if everyone on a company network was bittorrenting, other traffic would be interrupted (even on 2MB DSL, bittorrent interferes with my connections to many popular IM services and I don't even run it full throttle during the day).
No (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it won't replace standard downloads, if nothing else because bittorrent is "best effort", and there's no guarantee that the client receives a file within a certain time frame. And for small and medium files, the overhead of BT severely slows down the access.
Yes, it's useful for large files. No, it's no 100% replacement.
And that's the beauty of internet in a nutshell -- there isn't one solution that fits all, but lots and lots of tools and standards that can be used and adjusted to the specific needs. So stop looking for The One And Only Way.
Re:File size (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? because for small files (as I expect most software updates would be), downloading directly is quicker and safer.
Safer? Bittorrent already has built in checksumming which most people don't do with regular downloads anyways. By that metric alone I'd say the BitTorrent is safer than a regular download.
Re:Faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
"...that is able to fully saturate your connection."
Yeah, like this always happens. Not.
Scenario: 1st day of release of a new popular file.
Either the vendor prepares well and works with content-delivery networks so you and everyone else on the planet can download the file while saturating your network, or vendor doesn't.
If he doesn't, everyone gets throttled and/or some people are told to try again later.
A torrent option would help distribute the load and cut out the bottleneck.
Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
But you can control those factors. A VPN with a CIR, for example.
And even when you can't control it, you still can estimate much better. A 1:1 download that's doing 150 kBps for the first five minutes from a server with plenty of bandwidth isn't likely to drop to 15 kBps for half an hour and then pick up to 300 kBps.
If I need a large file, I look for a http download first, and only if I can't find that do I go to bittorrent. Because BT is usually going to take longer, and is always impossible to estimate. My boss wants to know how long it's going to take downloading a DVD, not "hopefully half an hour, possibly by tomorrow".
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
MPAA said the same thing about the VCR.
Can we go back to not giving a fuck what the MPAA thinks?
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You explained it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You explained it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the hell would it have to be in all the major browsers, when the ability to open files with external apps has been around for a decade, if not longer.
Just so you know, there have been Firefox addons for torrents for several years and Opera baked in right into the browser over 5 years ago.
Re:File size (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when you download directly instead of torrenting a file, you aren't basically shouting to the world "HEY I DON'T HAVE THE NEW SECURITY UPDATE YET! ANYONE HAVE THE NEW SECURITY UPDATE?"
Re:Take it a step further... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they require a server (tracker) to limit access to members only but that functionality would just be shifted to the social networking site.
If you're planning to do this without a tracker then how do you prevent people outside your friends list from joining the torrent (assuming they manage to find a copy of the
If you have friends list big enough to make bittorrent worth while it's quite likely that someone will leak the torrent file to someone they trust who may share it with someone else THEY trust etc, etc...
Setup and Teardown (Score:5, Insightful)
Bittorrent is great for very large files, and popular files.
But for small files it's really, really bad. Many linux patches involve downloading hundreds of small files, not one big one. Most applications are so small that the setup and teardown time for bittorrent would dwarf the download time. Any download that takes less than 5 will likely have a smoother user experience if it is not done using bittorrent.
Even ignoring tiny files, there is the issue of bandwidth limited users, the significantly higher routing requirements of bittorrent (many home routers flake out when you get 50+ TCP connections going through them), users with heavily asymmetrical connections (5Mbit down/256kbit up), and the more complicated configuration required to get a good bittorrent connection.
In short, bittorrent is nice for its niche (large, popular files), but outside that niche it is often not the best solution. Wider deployment of bittorrent technology would probably help some places, but it's not a silver bullet for all Internet downloads.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no reason the tracker couldn't limit the peer visibility such that only a few trusted seeder's IPs would be given to leechers. That is, each leecher would see an artificially low number of seeders, only seeders that were trusted. The client would then intentionally not use DHT or other mechanisms to find other peers.
For non-security or low priority updates, full tracker support could be allowed.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:5, Insightful)
Contacting the tracker and getting an initial peer list, in a proper system, takes a fraction of a second. It's iteratively contacting peers, obtaining their piece bitmap, negotiating with them for piece exchange, and finding peers that actually have high bandwidth that makes the startup time of BitTorrent so high.
Re:How about a share local option (Score:1, Insightful)
Ahh, yes. They call this newfangled technology a "caching proxy server", and it works quite well for http or ftp downloads. I run one on my router.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite... The difference is that you could download from any or ALL of the trusted peers (currently known as "mirror sites") at the same time. Seems a bit better than trying to pick from a list of mirrors that might be close to you or using the "random mirror" link. If one mirror was down or slow, it would barely be noticed on the downloader's end.
Also, once a machine downloaded and installed the patch it could then announce back to the tracker that it can be a seed as it is no longer vulnerable. So, the tracker would only show seeds, and the downloading system would only announce that it was a seed AFTER it installed the patch.
The known problem wth asymmetrical DSL (Score:3, Insightful)
If you become a seed for a popular file, you can peg your upload bandwidth. If your upload bandwidth is fairly small (Most users probably still have 1.5/384 or even 512/128 in the US), and you are trying to download something at the same time with TCP (HTTP, FTP, etc), the upload will clobber a lot of the ACKs that the download session is trying to send, and the download bandwidth will get clobbered as well.
You can work around this with QoS to some extent. Some cheap-ass DSL routers might now or soon even support a scheme where ACKs are prioritized over everything else.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Try running a perfectly legal BitTorrent tracker. You will find that the MPAA/RIAA criminals both DDOS your server and spam your ISP with DMCA crap regarding files you are not tracking and never heard of. They really dislike BitTorrent.
It's because it competes with them. Not as content producers, as distributors. If BitTorrent had a good reputation then indie filmmakers would use it to distribute their films to customers, perhaps as encrypted files with DRM, perhaps not, but in any event in competition with distributing them through official MPAA channels where the big companies get their big cut.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:1, Insightful)
Any educational institution offering these downloads do not consider it leeching. It is one of the many ways in which they promote the spread of knowledge, and, if it ever did become an issue, they would simply discontinue it. You sound like a disgruntled former FTP admin who didn't get equitable return for the media you offered.
Re:File size (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:File size (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead of BitTorrent (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't we have a generic TCP/IP transfer protocol which caches things at every hop it passed through?
That way, if a million people download a file, it gets uploaded once from the server to that server's ISP, stored once at that ISP, transferred once from that ISP to every other ISP that requests it, stored once at each of those, and then transferred once from each ISP to every LAN that requests it.
You know, the way Usenet used to work and still could if anyone bothered to resurrect it.
Seems like this would be the sensible, distributed, long-term solution to file distribution?
Re:You explained it. (Score:4, Insightful)
And the only Firefox addon they have is VideoDownloadHelper, because they went on Yahoo Answers asking how they could download YouTube videos.
Why would I have to start over? (Score:4, Insightful)
Both FTP and HTTP can fetch at offsets other than 0 and ftp at least has been able to do that for well over two decades. I haven't had to start a download over in a long, long time.
-Matt
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that bit torrent only works well if lots of people are seeding, which generally means that lots of people have downloaded recently.
(I downloaded Sita Sings the Blues yesterday, a while after it was released, and FTP from archive.org turned out to be much faster then a torrent.)
So torrent works well for CD images, and would probably work well for security updates, it would not work well for random apps from the repos.
Re:Take it a step further... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a heads up, this "game changer" is called a ftp server. My friends and family already have access to download my files or upload whatever.
Maybe what you want is a game changing facebook app that just manages passwords and opens a new window with your friends ftp server in it.
Why are you trying to reinvent the wheel?
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:5, Insightful)
But if the repositories were themselves seeding, then it'd work just fine: Worst case is that it's still at least as fast as HTTP or FTP from the same repository (plus or minus some BT overhead), all else being the same.
Best case is that there's several repositories all seeding the same basic set of random apps, plus a bunch of users who have already downloaded the random app, and things turn both faster and cheaper than they otherwise would have been.
The hash checks performed by BT will do well to prevent errors and/or poisoned apps, as well.
Sounds like a win to me.
Simple reasons... (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Direct download starts immediately and does not require others doing the same download to be more effective (all the contrary, in fact)
2) Direct Download does not require Mister I-Am-Not-A-Geek to fiddle with router or firewall configuration, opening ports and so on
3) Direct Download can go through your enterprise http proxy
Re:You explained it. (Score:5, Insightful)
This. People don't seem to realize that PDF, word documents, and flash will never take off as accepted formats for the layman unless they are baked into every major web-browser.
Wait, what?
Because Firefox's download manager sucks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but the built in download manager for Firefox sucks. Yes, it *can* resume... if you paused the download first. Even when it's told the file size, if your connection dies in the middle (which my connection too often does), it thinks it's "done" (which is absurd, because wget reports an error code) and you can't resume from within Firefox any more. Oh! I got an RST packet, that must mean that the last 300 MB transferred instantly!
I gave up on that piece of crap and used an add-on to make Firefox use wget, which at least has the decency to know when files have *actually* been fully downloaded, rather than giving up and deciding it's good enough to hand me a useless half file and no error messages at all. Seriously, have the devs never tested large downloads on a link that dies? It's not even hard to test: you can emulate the connection dying by pulling the damn ethernet cable. It just ignores the error and continues blindly. Does it really think that the other server going silent is an indicator that the file has been fully downloaded, or what?
Re:Why would I have to start over? (Score:3, Insightful)
The situation is even worse.
The market is full of faulty clients (that don't support resume or have faulty support, say, corrupt the file) and of faulty servers - ones that just don't support resume are less of a problem than the ones that claim to support it, and when asked to resume from offset 10000, happily start sending the file from the beginning.
Re:Why would I have to start over? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's right, but despite this I've had multiple failures in Firefox that cannot be recovered.
I would have thought that GetRight-type multisource, easy resume downloads would have been mainstream by now. But they're not.
Re:You explained it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, that's what resume is for... HTTP supports it, FTP supports it...
What i don't like are sites which force you to download files within the browser (which are designed for browsing, and generally have very poor download functions) instead of just presenting a url which you can cut+paste to wget.
Re:You explained it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Because your everyday normal "series of tubes" people can't go to the effort of using your "external apps."
And the only Firefox addon they have is VideoDownloadHelper, because they went on Yahoo Answers asking how they could download YouTube videos.
Yeah... tell that to the million of everyday normal "series of tubes" people (including the thousand harassed by the MAFIAA) who have used your "external apps" to download music and videos.
Of course, it won't catch up in offices because as I see it, currently it is very easy to block torrent traffic (my office do it) whereas if it was *needed* for day to day use they will have a bandwidth nightmare.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:3, Insightful)
Try it before declaring its "alive" or "dead". Its "schrodingers cat" until you actually try it. I tried using the numerous torrent to apt interfaces about two months ago, only got one working, forget which. Best case scenario was finding single digit seeders with performance roughly equal to ye olden dialup days. Needless to say after a couple days I dropped it, which I'm sure further lowered the network performance by a significant fraction.
The "problem" is Debian has hundreds of very fast mirrors. So any new system has an extremely high performance bar to exceed before its better than the current solution. Either you need the power of Slashdot to get many new users (like what happened to bitcoin, or to a lesser extent I2P) or you need the entire global mirror network to (temporarily?) fail and this to be the only alternative.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:3, Insightful)
The hash checks performed by BT will do well to prevent errors ...
Please, please tell this to all the dipshits who post torrents of RAR archives.
Re:You explained it. (Score:3, Insightful)
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
And ISPs start offering decent upstream bandwidth?
Right now I hate torrents because it always seems to be slower than a server with a good connection. The past few times I've been forced to use it, I've been uploading faster than I was downloading (I do have decent upstream).
Re:You explained it. (Score:3, Insightful)
At my job I torrented a Doctor Who audiofile pack, so I'd have something to relieve the boredom, and the next day the IT Staff was scanning my computer. I don't think torrenting will be permitted in the office. Ever.
From the summary:
>>>"Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over?"
Yes and it's ridiculous. Even back in the 80s we had the ZMODEM protocol on our lowly 8-bit Ataris and Commodores. If a file was interrupted the ZMODEM protocol had the ability to look at the last clean packet received, ask for the next packet in line, and thereby restart in the middle of the file. It's stupid that modern 64 bit browsers don't have the same "continue" function my old 8 bit software had.
Re:You explained it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people don't understand the fundamentals of TCP's congestion control/flow control. Bit torrent is a very greedy, selfish, egocentric, abusive (keep going with the adjectives) algorithm. It takes advantage of TCP's mechanism to provide fairness, and use it to abuse the rest of the users. While people is excited about it's performance to selfishly downloading data, the widespread of these type of algorithms may lead to unusable networks. Particularly, because there is no queue management enforced and marking mechanisms are not used by default, therefore, routers will drop packets and the end effect is a large number of retransmitted packets.
As the the parent points out what the grand parent states, the greed of such protocols even degrades the throughput by starving the acknowledgement packets.
Download resume isn't the speciality of torrents (Score:3, Insightful)
When my HTTP or FTP transfers fail I just use 'wget -c' to continue them.. No need to switch to torrents.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Bittorrent as its uses. It can help off load some of the traffic to your customers so you increase bandwidth without having to pay for it.
BUT there are some HUGE downsides:
A: You cannot rely on your customers to host your data, meaning you still have to supply a copy of the data AND serve it at expected speeds.
B: Customers might come when nobody else wants it, meaning you are STILL providing all the bandwidth. Customers will have little motivation to seed your content.
C: Many customers will not have the right setup to share data. Either firewall restrictions or ISP limitations.
D: You need to bake the bittorrent into your application (like WoW and other games do) or face endless questions by customers who are barely able to download in the first place.
E: Some content you don't want shared. How can you watermark content and tie it to a user if every user has the same file? Blizzard don't care who gets their patches since only legit users can play the game anyway and Linux torrents are of course free to start with.
F: for small files, bittorrent costs to much overhead. If I share a million MP3's the changes of finding anyone else with the same, willing and able to share it are tiny and the overhead will be more then the saved bandwidth.
So, this question is asked by a person who clearly hasn't understood the web, users, copyright or usability.
Re:The bigger question is: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's perfectly legal to download copyrighted material with the permission of the copyright holder (unless it breaks any other laws) in every country.
Why would the RIAA or anybody else want to poison Linux updates?
Because they, point-blank, would like to see ALL downloading of ANY files that are not expressly approved BY THEM to be made illegal and/or blocked by ISPs under government mandate. Yes, that's how they think. Do they care about Linux updates, specifically? Of course not: but the media cartel is all about banning entire technologies (cassette tape, DAT, writeable CDs and DVDS, the VCR, you-name-it.) If it can be used to copy entertainment data they feel they have the right to eliminate it, and should there be some "collateral damage", well, that's perfectly acceptable. Don't underestimate these people: yes, they're not particularly bright but they are dangerous, having both tremendous resources and the willing ears of imbecilic and corrupt lawmakers worldwide.
Why should I subsidize a for profit business? (Score:2, Insightful)
When A bit-torrent user gets Linux ISO's or Creative Commons movies or what not they are more willing to let the torrent seed because that is the price you are paying for the downloaded content.
So for any other paid content Why would the user give away their paid for bandwidth to some company which is already charging them money.
Now if we got a discount for our share ratio maybe that would be a game changer. For every 100% you upload you get 5-10% off the price of the content. I would sign up immediately.
Re:useful functionality, for those not in the know (Score:3, Insightful)
I like that the example given was VERY well suited for an obviously legal operation (fixing a corrupted Linux ISO) and NOT well suited for grabbing a movie. It's a genuinely useful and neat trick.