• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Is BitTorrent limited by cable download rate?

F

Felecha

Golden Member
Never tried BitTorrent before, but I heard about it. I just don't download movies. I have a nice cable connection that gives me a max of about 500K/sec, which makes almost anything pretty quick.

I wanted to download SUSE Linux as a DVD ISO, which is 3.6GB. I thought it might be an interesting test case for BitTorrent. I got the BT client and installed it and read about port forwarding and set my LinkSys to forward 6881 through 6889 to my 192.168.1.100 IP address. I think I did that correctly.

I've read the FAQ and understand roughly how it works. I watched it slowly pick up speed from a tiny rate to eventually about 275K/sec. After 20 minutes there it never got any faster.

So I wonder if the limit was just the number of folks out there available to get pieces from. And I wondered - if that was the case, and there were 10 times as many sharing, would I ever achieve a rate bigger than the 500K I usually see as a max? I didnt see anything in the FAQ that mentioned that idea.

I finally gave up and did it all with a straight download from a SUSE mirror site at an average of 475.
 
Bittorrent is totally dependent on the temporary infustructure created by seeders. Maybe they were all on cable with crappy upload speeds.

275KB/s = 2.2Mb/s

Assuming an average cable upload of 256Kb/s, that comes about to about 8.6 hosts, and assuming that they are doing other stuff, that definitely comes out to the 10hosts🙂
Keep in mind that BT clients also allow you to cap uploads, and many do so at 3KB/s 🙁 If that is the case, we are talking somewhere around 100hosts😱


Remember, BT(kids) is only as good as the Seeders(parents)

I have seen, many ocassions people reach multiMEGATBYTE speeds with good seeders

 
I dont follow all that, but are you saying that BT it can give a total effective download greater than the 500K I see with single connections?
 
Well, kind of.

What he's saying is that the total download speed you are able to achieve is dependent on the speed that the seeds are able to send at. Obviously, if the seeders can send you the file at a maximum of 275KBps, it's not going to be maxing your connection out.

With exceptionally good seeders, you can probably reach that 500KBps you are hitting with http or ftp downloads, but I would wager that such a speed is the limit of your connection and you will unable to get much faster, even downloading from multiple hosts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top