How update are the seed numbers of bt sites?

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  1. #1

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    How update are the seed numbers of bt sites?

    I visited three bt sites (mininova, piratebay and isohunt) and noticed that each reported a different number of seeds for the same torrent. From your experience which of those sites shows the most updated statistics?


  2. #2

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    discobay, it varies, on whether they are delivering you a cached BT file or they are running their own BT servers. If they are not running the BT servers it depends how often they poll the 3rd party BT servers for stats.

    Determining which one is the most accurate is not an easy thing to do.

    Last edited by hk.com; 24-04-2007 at 11:50 PM.

  3. #3

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    Damn I should have known better than to ask a difficult question!


  4. #4

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    I forgot to add this. When you get a Torrent file you can be given multiple trackers (BT servers) to talk to and then you select one.

    You maybe disappointed by the discrepancy of the of seeds and leaches that are shown on a site and what you actually get to talk to whilst you are downloading. It is most likely to be caused because you are only seeing one tracker and not everyone across all the trackers.

    What I would like to see is Bit torrent protocol pairing people that are the closest together based on the (AS number/ISP cloud). When you download anyone within the same ISP or nearest to your ISP would be who you exchange the most data with. This would allow to download files with the least impact to the ISPs international links.

    BT servers can also configure the "generosity" policy or what sort of Upload/Dload ratio you can max out at. Eg if you down a linux image their torrent/trackers are configured to give you the maximum throughput without you having to give back much uploading.

    I've no expert on the bittorrent protocol. What I am saying is based on watching my own client download files and draw up some conclusions and may not be totally accurate.


  5. #5

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    Sounds reasonable but there is a risk of overloading your local isps if a torrent is popular even when there are plenty of copies not held locally.


  6. #6

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    hk.com - http://research.microsoft.com/~padma...tr-2005-03.pdf

    Ironically from microsoft ..


  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by discobay:
    Sounds reasonable but there is a risk of overloading your local isps if a torrent is popular even when there are plenty of copies not held locally.
    not at all, it would be better. The local copies would only be switched in the distribution layer of the network and the core routers would not be taxed as the traffic is not going out externally. Also the bandwidth internally to the network is free, and even if you want to be switching Terrabits of bandwidth it would not have any on going costs once the 1GE/10GE switches have been bought.

  8. #8

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    Now you're just showing off. OK, call me stupid but I got less than 50% of that and the rest just sounded like blah blah blah.


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    Not showing off. I listen to the screams and cries from our customers (ISPs) to whom we supply the equipment how their CPU loading is so high. The current way that bittorrent operates is most expensive in terms of international bandwidth (costly).

    To make sure you can talk to all the seeds on a tracker make sure you also have enough ram on your router to handle it. On mine I see the firewall /NAT entries take up to 40MB of RAM. If you don't have enough ram, you will see lots of peers but will only have a small number of concurrent connections.


  10. #10

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    Adding ram to my router ... hmmm interesting ... need to look into that.


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