On Sat February 7 2009, John Andersen wrote:
On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:18 PM, James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> wrote:
Richard wrote:
Ok. I admit it. I am old and feeble of brain. Can someone please tell me, in simple terms, how BitTorrent is "better" for downloading. I have been trying to download a large file, 11+Gb, using kbittorrent. When it started it showed 8 hrs remaining and a speed of maybe 65Kb down, as I recall. This was over a day ago. Ok, I let it run. 4 hours later it shows 7 hrs to go. Umm, this is progress? Ok, I go to work, return...6 hrs to go. Cheez! Let it run overnight, now shows 20+ hrs to go. I am no math whiz, but I think I am a little smarter than a 5th grader, and I would be willing to bet that this is longer. This does not like progress and I am wondering what either I am doing wrong, or what might be wrong with the system, or it this just how it works and there is some hidden benefit that I am not seeing, like for every hour of download starving children somewhere are fed and clothed.
Thanks for steering me to the light.
Richar
The idea is to share the load among multiple sources, but some ISPs deliberately slow the transfer.
And even if they didn't, bittorrent with a very small number of seeders is usually slower than a http download.
But I have to ask the OP if he has inbound ports properly passed thru his firewall? The most common complaint is due to no inward ports open or too much or too little upload bandwidth allocated. Being too generous can swamp your upload bandwidth slowing download acks as well. Being too stingy gets you throttled.
-- ----------JSA--------- Someone stole my tag line, so now I have this rental.
Thanks to all for all the responses and explanations. I feel like I have a better sense of options and abilities now. John: I have no idea what the answers to your questions might be. I have not purposely checked or set any of the apparent options you have asked about. At this point I am using a "stock" 11.0 x64 system, with nothing specifically modified or changed from the defaults. I am on a cable modem so generally see pretty fast downloads and uploads and don't recall having used torrent before. I had seen it referenced in other posts but never had a need. It always sounded like it ought to be either more efficient or quicker, or both, so when an opportunity to d/l a large file, 11Gb, 4 movies, and torrent was the only option, I said, why not? Then a d/l speed from slow to slower to "I think maybe I could telephone the file by reading one's and zero's quicker" got my wonder up. I stopped the d/l, but think I recall only about 9 seeders so this may have been an effect of very few users, as suggested by other responders. Your questions open up a new world, so I can see that if I want to enter this world I have some studying to do. Any suggestions for good reading? I usually just start to do searches in the Suse knowledge base. Thanks for your interest and time in responding. Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org