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BitTorrent Open Sources ‘Improved’ BitTorrent Protocol
- Locke1689 16y agoIf the current BT protocol is TCP, what makes TCP congestion control ineffective?
- 146 16y agoTCP's congestion control algorithm is mostly reactive, while UTP aims to be predictive. What this basically means is that all the TCP connections that Bittorrent opens up are all pushing the network to failure before backing off, and given how many connections Bittorrent makes, wreaks havoc on your quality of service. UTP on the other hand will attempt to predict the congestion control limits, and (I'm guessing) play nicely and slowly reach up to that limit.
- Locke1689 16y agoVery interesting, thanks for taking the time to respond. The first time through I read about congestion control addition and thought that BT used UDP.
- dedward 16y agoI don't think that's the issue.... it's just that when you have. A massive number of sumultaneous tcp sessions, lots of home routers choke up tracking all that state in their nat tables. A custom protocol could do a better job.
- Locke1689 16y agoThe article specifically mentions additional congestion control as a significant part of the protocol. For the routers themselves, UTP is also an IP protocol so it should have most of the same state requirements (routing tables) as the same number of TCP connections.
- dedward 16y agoTrue enough... Time to dig into the details I guess.
- krakensden 16y agoWill the UDP version be easier on plastic NATs? One of the major problems with the TCP version of bittorrent is it tends to overwhelm the cheap wireless boxes everyone buys, making performance much worse than it should be.