[ NNSquad ] Re: Comments on NNSquad Purpose

[John Pettitt <jpp@cloudview.com>]

Brett Glass wrote:
> At 02:17 PM 11/8/2007, Andrew C Burnette wrote:
>  
>   
> > Brett,
> >
> > With all due respect of course,
> >
> > Filesharing in and of itself is neither abusive, nor unlawful. 
> >     
>
> Use of applications which attempt to take over the network is abusive. BitTorrent, Limewire, etc. are good examples. BitTorrent and Limewire in particular "invite" the entire world to bombard your network with requests for files, in such a way that even if the ISP attempts to throttle the onslaught its upstream bandwidth is still consumed by the unending flood of requests. It's like spreading hamburger all over someone's lawn. Every dog in the neighborhood will soon be there annoying the poor victim even if you are long gone.
>   
Huh?  BitTorrent (all the main implementations) are pretty good about 
managing bandwidth - they have to be so the user can set a desired 
upstream data rate at a level that still permits web surfing.  BT 
doesn't invite connection from the entire world,  clients are introduced 
by the tracker (and a in some cases by peer exchange) - most client 
implementation stop asking for introduction at around 60 peers and if 
the client is done downloading and just seeding it may only be talking 
to 4-8 other those.  When the client goes away you get aborted tcp 
sessions, depending on the client firewall either a RST or a black 
hole.  Either way the traffic is minimal after the client is gone.

The "problem" with BT is that it's very good at using all the bandwidth 
you give it.  Assuming a user is not the initial seeder a client will, 
on average, upload the same amount as it downloads.   Like all averages 
that hides some wild extremes but for a large ISP it will work out about 
even.

John