On 02/08/2009 03:02 PM, Richard wrote:
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
One thing I haven't seen mentioned, and a big advantage of bittorent, is the way it downloads and therefore checks. When you download big files, getting a bad download increases. Bittorent downloads in chunks of the file, and is able to verify each and every chunk resulting in a higher degree of good downloads. Because of the superior checking of the downloads, (and if it finds a bad chunk it only needs to redownload the bad chunk(s) instead of the whole file) to be the main benefit to bittorent over other download methods. If the file isn't big, then any method will probably work well, but with large multi gig files, redownloading the whole thing is very inefficient. HTH. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 11.1 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org