Hacker News Reader

Comment by crtasm | Hacker News Reader

If your torrent client is having a negative effect on other traffic then use its bandwidth limiter.

You can also lower how many connections it makes, but I don't know anyone that's had need to change that. Could you show us which client defaults to connecting to hundreds of peers?

View on HN

My example was to show locally what happens -- the ISP does not have control over how many connections you make. I'm saying that if you have X TCP connections for HTTP and 100X TCP connections for BitTorrent, the HTTP connections will be drowned out. Therefore, when the link at your ISP becomes congested, HTTP will be disproportionately affected.

For the second question, read the section on choking at https://deluge-torrent.org/userguide/bandwidthtweaking/ and Deluge appears to set the maximum number of connections per torrent of 120 with a global max of 250 (though I've seen 500+ in my brief searching, mostly for Transmission and other clients).

I'll admit a lot of my BitTorrent knowledge is dated (having last used it ~15 years ago) but the point remains: ISPs are built for "North-South" traffic, that is: To/From the customer and the networks with the content, not between customers, and certainly not between customers of differing ISPs.

Torrents don't use anything like TCP congestion control and 100 connections will take a good chunk of bandwidth but much much less than 100 TCP flows.

... What? You realise BitTorrent runs over TCP/IP right?

TCP is a fallback if it can't use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol

I should have said they avoid TCP in favor of very different congestion control, sorry.

Interesting... It's been ~15 years since I last used BitTorrent personally, and I had asked a friend before replying and they swore that all their traffic was TCP -- though perhaps that may be due to CGNAT or something similar causing that fallback scenario you describe.

Thanks for the info, and sorry for jumping to a conclusion! Though my original point stands: Residential ISPs are generally not built to handle BitTorrent traffic flows (customer to customer or customer to other-ISP-customer across large geographic areas) so the bursty nature would cause congestion much easier, and BitTorrent itself isn't really made for these kinds of scenarios where content changes on a daily basis. CDNs exist for a reason, even if they're not readily available at reasonable prices for projects like OP!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com