Talk:BitTorrent

I am surprised that the tracker takes a lot of bandwidth. Are we confusing tracking with seeding? 69.225.139.155 14:41, 6 Apr 2005 (PDT)

I'm surprised too
I thought the whole point of BT was to reduce bandwidth demand on servers.

Can it be that when BT caused problems for DreamHost, the software was misconfigured or misused? Perhaps if it was installed and configured by DH rather than by customers, there wouldn't be any problems.--Al-khowarizmi 00:10, 27 May 2005 (PDT)

What about...
I would love to setup a nice small tracker for some of the files I've created. So they wouldn't use up all my bandwidth on DH. (All 100% Legal)

I found this nice tracker called "Blog Torrent". http://www.blogtorrent.com/

I wonder if they would allow this/or would consider allowing this in the future.

Possibly
There might be a few other reasons for this... for example, the tracker has to serve the .torrent (not that big of a deal).. then the clients can ping or constantly update the statistics of the .torrent by talking to the tracker (if a client is chatty (always wants to update), this can take up lots of bandwidth)..

Just a few ideas --GooberDLX

?Distributed p2p downloads on dreamhost
I run a mostly a business related blog, as a window into the world of starting a business at Jdavid.net, but i am also involved in a number of sites that are getting into the whole pod/vidcasting worlds. One site, http://Occamshammer.com will offer an open enviroment for filmmakers to communicate and build short films together. I hope to use some sort of distributed p2p network to lesson the load on servers and bandwidth all around. My guess for dreamhost, and thier stance on bittorrent is related to sites running ftp servers with scripts, and a bittorrent tracker, thus anyone can then host an illegal file instantly and dreamhost gets slammed with traffic and letters from copyright holders(bandwidth) that a site is acting poorly. I have seen the blogtorrent.com site before and from what i see, dreamhost will not have a good reason to shut down a service like so. So, I plan to use it until dreamhost says otherwise, I will more than quickly abide to turn it off. Annother solution that I found is swarmcasting, this does not use a tracker, but requires the client to install software that is not avalible yet. I have a beta version of the client and it works great. http://swarmcast.net/

jdavid

October 3, 2005
http://swarmcast.net/ swarmcast has hit beta 6 and is now avalible for public release.

jdavid

BitTorrent requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work
The problem with BitTorrent is that the client keeps querying the site to get an updated list of IP addresses to share with. The client connects to the PHP script, which then references the MySQL database and fishes through the database to find the IP addresses it needs. It then extracts them and supplies the data to the PHP script, which then organizes the results and sends it back to the client.

This doesn't really take tons of bandwidth in a relative comparison to directly hosting the files. The problem is that when people are transferring hundreds of gigabytes of stuff per day on your tracker, then indeed the overhead bandwidth is a problem for the web host. This whole process, though, takes A LOT more CPU usage than an average website, and also will tie up many of the limited simultaneous connections which are allowed to the MySQL database.

So if the company wants to make their service economical to most users, they do so under the assumption that they won't need tons of CPU power and MySQL connections.

A partial solution to this would be to lengthen the time allowed between queries on the tracker.

Allowed under certain circumstances
I asked for permission to install a bittorrent tracker and was initially turned down. But a few emails later my request was forwarded to an "administrators who is a bit more familiar with the impact trackers have on our servers"

this is the reply I got -

"You can install a bittorrent tracker if you'd like. However please note that you'll need to use it to distribute only material to which you own the copyright.And of course we reserve the right to disable your tracker if it begins to use an unreasonable amount of system resources, just as we would with any other CPU-intensive script."

I have been running a bittorrent tracker now for around 5 months, and looking at my cpu logs, it takes about 600-700 CPU seconds a day (which comes to around 10 minutes.. far less than the maximum of 60 minutes). It's a relatively small tracker, around 30 leechers at any one time.

I use the Btitracker Source available at http://www.btiteam.org

If you're wanting to run a tracker on your shared hosting, email DH staff and ask for permission. You'll get rejected, but explain how it works and explain that it's not a CPU intensive task.