Re:Download responsibly
by Dylan16807 on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @02:29AM
(#45343482)
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.
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... What? You realise BitTorrent runs over TCP/IP right?
Re:Download responsibly
by Dylan16807 on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @03:05PM
(#45351355)
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!