It appears Valve has hired the author of BitTorrent.

[BigJ]

Originally posted by: yukichigai

Originally posted by: MrBond
I'm honestly surprised it took someone this long to hire him. This sort of distributed system is exactly what downloadable media services need (like a box where you can "rent" movies by downloading them).

The only real disadvantage is that currently, BT will saturate a connection. If someone has a 15k/sec upload, it'll take it all and make browsing slow.

If that's not fixed for Steam (which is exactly what he'll be working on), it's going to piss a lot of people off when they can't play HL2 online because in the background Steam is distributing the latest patch to other people. They'll have to work in a way to prioritize certain traffic so it doesn't kill a connection.

It'll also get the attention of broadband providers, because the average user won't use all that much of their upload, but when little Johnny downloads HL2 over steam and it starts distributing it to other people who bought the game, it's going to rack up a lot of upload traffic. A constant 10k/upload for an entire month can push almost 26GB of data by my calculations. (10k/sec * 86400sec/day * 30days/month / 1,000,000k/gb)

I use burst!, which lets you put a cap on your upload speed and the number of simultaneous connections per download. I was sick of people eating 70k of my upload while I got about 15k download combined, probably because of having no open sockets to get any more download speed. :|

Azurues has been letting me do that for awhile. Granted theres a minimum upload of 5kBps, but when i have 1megabit upload, that's really not a big deal. And on a popular torrent I average anywhere from 100-450kBps through BT.

 

[MrBond]

That is a problem with your router and traffic prioritization.

I'm not complaining, I can use my BT client to throttle uploads to 10k/sec. The thing is, I've had it happen on FOUR different consumer-level routers. They're popular brands (linksys and netgear) and lots of people use those. With a BT-style upload, it's going to saturate a connection in its current form unless they build in the ability to limit upload speeds (the official BT client won't do that, however nearly all third-party ones will)

Edit: not to mention to fully utilize the speed of BT, you need to forward ports through the router, something that will be above the average user.