Quote:
Originally posted by KnifeMissle
Regarding performace, you should not two things.
One, you can pause and restart your downloading whenever you like and however often you like (as long as the tracker is still there) but you will lose all credit for doing so. You see, what makes Bit Torrent so great is that it only allows you to download as much as you're uploading (with a few caveats I won't go into, at the moment) so no one can "leech." This ensures a healthy network and, in turn, gives everyone good bandwidth. However, if you restart, it can't know how much you've already contributed and will treat you like a leecher, again. So, it really is better to download the file in one fell swoop (for you, anyway). This might explain why you're not getting the speeds you were hoping. It takes a while for the system to get to it's peak download speed but when it does, it is awesome!
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This isn't entirely accurate. I'm currently writing a Bit Torrent client, and though this is how it
ought to work, 99% of clients (including the official client) only return in bandwidth what they are currently recieving. Basically the attitude is, "ok, so what have you done for me recently?" So if you're currently uploading to someone, there's a good chance they'll upload back at you, but let's say you've uploaded some guy to 50%, and now he's actually at 75%, but he has all the data you've downloaded so you can no longer upload to him. He'll most likely not give you the 25% you need since you no longer have an upload rate to him (even if he hasn't sent a single bit to you). This doesn't happen too often, though, since after an initial new user benefit of the doubt, your client probably acts the same way as theirs does.
My client will not use this method, and actually has an option to set an upload/download ratio to keep with all clients (so if you set it to 1:1, then most likely by the time you start seeding, there's only a small chance that you'll have uploaded substantially more than you downloaded). You can't set the ratio to less than 1:1, btw, so it's not a "leecher" client. You can disable this feature and have it act just like all the other clients, though.
By the way, the codebase I'm using for my client (I didn't write it) is current in beta testing and can be found at
http://libtorrent.sourceforge.net/
I'm using this codebase and making a GUI in .NET for Windows, and it currently uses less CPU and RAM on average than most other clients I've seen. Still has a few bugs though, so I'm not going to release it to the public for a while yet.