Friend-machines-assisted approach to boosting one's BitTorrent download

[bootedcat]

I have an idea about boosting one's downloading in a swarm, and wish

your kind evaluation and implementation.

Suppose I have several friends whose machines are often idle when I

want to download something via a torrent. These friend machines have

quite good broadband connection speed with my machine. Because of some

agreement between us, they allow me to signal their machines to join a

torrent of my interest.

So these friend machines automatically join a torrent when I do. But

this alone may not help boost my own downloading much. So, I would like

the friend machines and my machine to try download chunks different

from that of each other. As soon as these macihnes combined have all

the chunks, they can quite the torrent (doing so all of a sudden can

harm the rest of the swarm, so somebody advised me that they should

quit one by one in moderate intervals), and transfer their chunks that

I don't have yet to my machine. Of course we assume that downloading

these chunks via the torrent is slower than via the friends-to-me

broadband connections.

So, can this friend-machines-assisted approach make my downloading

faster than my machine alone in the torrent swarm?

Best Regards,

Yao Ziyuan

[bitdave]

This will not help your download speed. In fact it will more likely slow you download.

An example, lets say there is only one seeder.

If you are the only leecher then that seeder can dedicate all his upload bandwidth to you and you will get the file fairly quickly.

Now lets say there are ten leechers and the seeder sends different pieces to all the leechers. The seeder still only has the same amount of upload bandwidth, but now there is overhead and latency issues between ten leechers instead of one. This will cause the ammount of bandwidth he has to transfer actual data to decrease. So it will cause your download to take longer.

What you are describing here is called Super Seeding. This does not help your individual download speed, what it does help is that in almost the same amount of time that it would take the original seeder to send the file to one leecher, he is now able to send it to 10 leechers. This means that he can just seed his original file to a 1.0 ratio and thanks to super-seeding he has in essence seeded to a 10.0 ratio.

So what your saying helps the swarm but doesnt help you individually. Did this make sense to you?

[Dark_Shroud]

And the only client that has a decent working super-seed (aka Initial seed) is BitTornado, who also developed it. µTorrent's is compleatly broken and Azureuz... has problems as well depending on what version the problems change.

This feature is not standard and usually causes more problems then it helps because people do not understand how it works and that you need at least 2 peers or else the download will hault.

BitTornado is a good client but the the Shadow doesn't release hit betas very much. He's done a lot of work but it's behind closed doors to us. So we just have to wait for his big release.