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how does the webtorrent team respond to criticisms of sequential downloading in torrents? while i personally believe folks should mirror & seed torrents regard

how does the webtorrent team respond to criticisms of sequential downloading in torrents? while i personally believe folks should mirror & seed torrents regardless of how others consume these torrents, i'm curious about the developers' perspectives on this issue in any case, this desktop app looks very slick, thanks webtorrent team for all work pushing webrtc and torrenting forward

feross 11y ago
WebTorrent supports two download modes: sequential and rarest-first. In sequential mode, pieces are fetched with high priority when they're immediately needed for streaming. In rarest-first mode, the traditional approach is used. We're going to add automatic mode switching to a future release, so rarest-first will be used most of the time. The only time sequential mode is needed is right when streaming begins and every time a seek happens. I think this is a nice balance between helping the local user and keeping the swarm healthy.
dcposch 11y ago
* It only download sequentially when you're streaming. If you're just downloading a torrent, it will use rarest-first. * We plan to switch to a hybrid strategy: it will download the blocks it needs, but once enough video is buffered, it will transition to rarest-first. * It doesn't really matter. This used to be more of an issue back when torrents took hours or days to download and upload speeds were slow. If you download the entire torrent in five minutes and then seed it for days, it doesn't matter for the health of the swarm what order you downloaded the pieces in.
- kylecordes 11y ago
  This might be more complexity than you are ready for, but here's what I suggest: * Remove the notion of two different modes. * Remove the ability to switch between two modes. Because with this capability, people will inevitably switch it to the greedy mode, even if they have no need to, out of an inane fear that they might need to. * Implement your hybrid mode, again without a "switching" mechanism: * In your implementation of "rarest first", artificially apply extra weight to the next N segments that will be needed for the current play point. I think this will result in very good behavior, in all cases. It is completely hands-off. Users tight on bandwidth will inevitably spend all of their bandwidth downloading the extra weighted segments needed to place soon. Users with any spare bandwidth will easily get past the next and segments, and then the rarest segments will automatically be the next fetched. All without any switches for users to set wrong.
  - feross 11y ago
    This is an excellent suggestion – we're actually planning to do basically what you describe. And you're totally right that the user shouldn't need to switch between the modes manually. There's no UI for that option, and I don't think there should be. That's just an option of the underlying WebTorrent torrent engine (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent https://github.com/feross/webtorrent), though even that should probably be removed. :)

feross 11y ago

WebTorrent supports two download modes: sequential and rarest-first. In sequential mode, pieces are fetched with high priority when they're immediately needed for streaming. In rarest-first mode, the traditional approach is used. We're going to add automatic mode switching to a future release, so rarest-first will be used most of the time. The only time sequential mode is needed is right when streaming begins and every time a seek happens. I think this is a nice balance between helping the local user and keeping the swarm healthy.

dcposch 11y ago

* It only download sequentially when you're streaming. If you're just downloading a torrent, it will use rarest-first. * We plan to switch to a hybrid strategy: it will download the blocks it needs, but once enough video is buffered, it will transition to rarest-first. * It doesn't really matter. This used to be more of an issue back when torrents took hours or days to download and upload speeds were slow. If you download the entire torrent in five minutes and then seed it for days, it doesn't matter for the health of the swarm what order you downloaded the pieces in.

kylecordes 11y ago
This might be more complexity than you are ready for, but here's what I suggest: * Remove the notion of two different modes. * Remove the ability to switch between two modes. Because with this capability, people will inevitably switch it to the greedy mode, even if they have no need to, out of an inane fear that they might need to. * Implement your hybrid mode, again without a "switching" mechanism: * In your implementation of "rarest first", artificially apply extra weight to the next N segments that will be needed for the current play point. I think this will result in very good behavior, in all cases. It is completely hands-off. Users tight on bandwidth will inevitably spend all of their bandwidth downloading the extra weighted segments needed to place soon. Users with any spare bandwidth will easily get past the next and segments, and then the rarest segments will automatically be the next fetched. All without any switches for users to set wrong.
- feross 11y ago
  This is an excellent suggestion – we're actually planning to do basically what you describe. And you're totally right that the user shouldn't need to switch between the modes manually. There's no UI for that option, and I don't think there should be. That's just an option of the underlying WebTorrent torrent engine (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent https://github.com/feross/webtorrent), though even that should probably be removed. :)