Prioritize pieces by rarity

[Daktarin]

One of the most annoying things with a torrent transfer is getting 99% of the download to find that the one peer with the last piece of the puzzle so to speak, is online for five minutes every second Tuesday (only you don't know that).

Since we get a rough bar graph of the pieces available on connected peers, would it be possible to prioritize the pieces transfered by rarity, meaning that for any peer we are connected to, we get the pieces that appear least on the other peers?

Even better, would it be possible to request the least common pieces when we are looking for peers to connect to? We get an availability map so there must be some information on this passed around.

Thanks for a really great product.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

In a bittorrent swarm the distribution of pieces is handled by the protocol designed and published for bittorrent... bitcomet cannot alter that but can enhance it by adding to it., however in a case where there were some rare pieces of data there is no way any one peer could know where they were or even how to connect tot he peers to get them. Each peer that joins the swarm has a target number of peers to connect to and once that target is met, they won't accept more peer connections. However all seeders have all the pieces so if all peers do their part in seeding, this would never be a problem.

There are some times when the entire swarm is stuck at 99.x% for lack of seeders, but most cases when someone is stuck at 99% are from a different cause which we've address in the FAQs on wiki.bitcomet.com.

BitComet has also added some unique enhancements to help speed downloads and help complete unseeded or poorly seeded torrents. Unlike every other client a bitcomet peer can download from sources outside the torrents swarm, either http/ftp sources, emule or bitcomets on LTseed sources. Bitcomet can even download from peers of a different torrent swarm with all or some of the same files. In some cases you could even download the data from an alternate source and become a seeder so you could share with the rest of the swarm and revive a dead torrent.

Basically bitcomet has done much to improve the overall download performance and experience, but I don't see any way it would be possible to know what pieces are going to be rare or what peers would have them because info about peers you're unaware of and not connected to just isn't shared within the swarm and even if there was massive changes made to the protocol to allow for this, the data would probably be obsolete by the time it got to you since peers constantly come and go so the only accurate data is what you get "now" from connected peers.

I don't see any way to change this.

However if you have a problem with a task that is stuck at 99%, I recommend you look into exactly where the problem is with that specific task. In some cases it could be a router setting causing rubbish data. Each case is different has to be addressed separately.