Torrent Woes
The worst thing about pirating tons of free movies, TV shows, and music….er I mean downloading open source content like Linux distributions, is the fact that torrents have a tendency to hose your friggin connection when it comes to doing much else with it that is the slightest bit latency sensitive. Like gaming maybe? But the goombas that built this blog page (that looks more like a site advertising a couple of ambulance chasing lawyers) have some interesting insight to what the actual cause is and how at least part of it could be fixed.
After running these tests, I am beginning to conclude that it isn't so much the amount of data that causes excessive latency; it's the uniformity of data transmission. If the transmissions are spaced evenly, other packets from other applications can slip in between the packets rather than getting stuck behind multiple packets in the transmit queue. So would it be possible to engineer BitTorrent to transmit data uniformly and what would be the effect? I came up with the following chart to illustrate what this could mean for peaceful coexistence between VoIP/Gaming and BitTorrent/P2P.
I would have posted this 6 minutes ago but I could not work the post in between a shaky-cam version of Iron Man. And aren’t these guys old enough to get their own places and not worry about a “roommate” situation? Thanks Kevin!
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