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From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to e

From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to eyeball network for which there is no "cheap" path available (potentially causing congestion of transit ports affecting everyone) and no reliable way of forecasting where the traffic will come from making capacity planning a nightmare. Additionally, as anyone who has tried to share an internet connection with someone heavily torrenting, the excessive number of connections means overall quality of non-torrent traffic on networks goes down. Not to mention, of course, that BitTorrent has a significant stigma attached to it. The answer would have been a squid cache box before, but https makes that very difficult as you would have to install mitm certs on all devices. For container images, yes you have pull through registries etc, but not only are these non-trivial to setup (as a service and for each client) the cloud providers charge quite a lot for storage making it difficult to justify when not having a check "works just fine". The Linux distros (and CPAN and texlive etc) have had mirror networks for years that partially addresses these problems, and there was an OpenCaching project running that could have helped, but it is not really sustainable for the wide variety of content that would be cached outside of video media or packages that only appear on caches hours after publishing. BitTorrent might seem seductive, but it just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.

rlpb 1y ago
> From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to eyeball network for which there is no "cheap" path available... As a consumer, I pay the same for my data transfer regardless of the location of the endpoint though, and ISPs arrange peering accordingly. If this topology is common then I expect ISPs to adjust their arrangements to cater for it, just the same as any other topology.
- dotwaffle 1y ago
  > ISPs arrange peering accordingly Two eyeball networks (consumer/business ISPs) are unlikely to have large PNIs with each other across wide geographical areas to cover sudden bursts of traffic between them. They will, however, have substantial capacity to content networks (not just CDNs, but AWS/Google etc) which is what they will have built out. BitTorrent turns fairly predictable "North/South" traffic where capacity can be planned in advance and handed off "hot potato" as quickly as possible, into what is essentially "East/West" with no clear consistency which would cause massive amounts of congestion and/or unused capacity as they have to carry it potentially over long distances they have not been used to, with no guarantee that this large flow will exist in a few weeks time. If BitTorrent knew network topology, it could act smarter -- CDNs accept BGP feeds from carriers and ISPs so that they can steer the traffic, this isn't practical for BitTorrent!
  - sulandor 1y ago
    bittorrent will make best use of what bandwidth is available. better think of it as a dynamic cdn which can seamlessly incorporate static cdn-nodes (see webseed). it could surely be made to care for topology but imho handing that problem to congestion control and routing mechanisms in lower levels works good enough and should not be a problem.
    - dotwaffle 1y ago
      > bittorrent will make best use of what bandwidth is available. At the expense of other traffic. Do this experiment: find something large-ish to download over HTTP, perhaps an ISO or similar from Debian or FreeBSD. See what the speed is like, and try looking at a few websites. Now have a large torrent active at the same time, and see how slow the HTTP download drops to, and how much slower the web is. Perhaps try a Twitch stream or YouTube video, and see how the quality suffers greatly and/or starts rebuffering. Your HTTP download uses a single TCP connection, most websites will just use a single connection also (perhaps a few short-duration extra connections for js libraries on different domains etc). By comparison, BitTorrent will have dozens if not hundreds of connections open and so instead of sharing that connection in half (roughly) it is monopolising 95%+ of your connection. The other main issue I forgot to mention is that on most cloud providers, downloading from the internet is free, uploading to the internet costs a lot... So not many on public cloud are going to want to start seeding torrents!
      - sneak 1y ago
        The number of connections isn’t relevant. A single connection can cause the same problem with enough traffic. Your bandwidth is not allocated on a per-connection basis.
        dotwaffle 1y ago
        If you download 2 separate files over HTTP, you'd expect each to get roughly 1/2 of the available bandwidth at the bottleneck. With 1 HTTP connection downloading a file and 100 BitTorrent connections trying to download a file, all trying to compete, you'll find the HTTP throughput significantly reduced. It's how congestion control algorithms are designed: rough fairness per connection. That's why the first edition of BBR that Google released was unpopular, it stomped on other traffic.

rlpb 1y ago

> From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to eyeball network for which there is no "cheap" path available... As a consumer, I pay the same for my data transfer regardless of the location of the endpoint though, and ISPs arrange peering accordingly. If this topology is common then I expect ISPs to adjust their arrangements to cater for it, just the same as any other topology.

dotwaffle 1y ago
> ISPs arrange peering accordingly Two eyeball networks (consumer/business ISPs) are unlikely to have large PNIs with each other across wide geographical areas to cover sudden bursts of traffic between them. They will, however, have substantial capacity to content networks (not just CDNs, but AWS/Google etc) which is what they will have built out. BitTorrent turns fairly predictable "North/South" traffic where capacity can be planned in advance and handed off "hot potato" as quickly as possible, into what is essentially "East/West" with no clear consistency which would cause massive amounts of congestion and/or unused capacity as they have to carry it potentially over long distances they have not been used to, with no guarantee that this large flow will exist in a few weeks time. If BitTorrent knew network topology, it could act smarter -- CDNs accept BGP feeds from carriers and ISPs so that they can steer the traffic, this isn't practical for BitTorrent!
- sulandor 1y ago
  bittorrent will make best use of what bandwidth is available. better think of it as a dynamic cdn which can seamlessly incorporate static cdn-nodes (see webseed). it could surely be made to care for topology but imho handing that problem to congestion control and routing mechanisms in lower levels works good enough and should not be a problem.
  - dotwaffle 1y ago
    > bittorrent will make best use of what bandwidth is available. At the expense of other traffic. Do this experiment: find something large-ish to download over HTTP, perhaps an ISO or similar from Debian or FreeBSD. See what the speed is like, and try looking at a few websites. Now have a large torrent active at the same time, and see how slow the HTTP download drops to, and how much slower the web is. Perhaps try a Twitch stream or YouTube video, and see how the quality suffers greatly and/or starts rebuffering. Your HTTP download uses a single TCP connection, most websites will just use a single connection also (perhaps a few short-duration extra connections for js libraries on different domains etc). By comparison, BitTorrent will have dozens if not hundreds of connections open and so instead of sharing that connection in half (roughly) it is monopolising 95%+ of your connection. The other main issue I forgot to mention is that on most cloud providers, downloading from the internet is free, uploading to the internet costs a lot... So not many on public cloud are going to want to start seeding torrents!
    - sneak 1y ago
      The number of connections isn’t relevant. A single connection can cause the same problem with enough traffic. Your bandwidth is not allocated on a per-connection basis.
      - dotwaffle 1y ago
        If you download 2 separate files over HTTP, you'd expect each to get roughly 1/2 of the available bandwidth at the bottleneck. With 1 HTTP connection downloading a file and 100 BitTorrent connections trying to download a file, all trying to compete, you'll find the HTTP throughput significantly reduced. It's how congestion control algorithms are designed: rough fairness per connection. That's why the first edition of BBR that Google released was unpopular, it stomped on other traffic.