A Little Off

I can’t even begin to describe how annoying it is to download a torrent and to discover that the person that compiled it added a bunch of trackers to it but didn’t bother to take into consideration that not all torrent clients (at least one) handle multi-trackers properly if you don’t put blank lines in between each tracker.

Like so:

Now I know for a fact that μtorrent requires this but I’m not sure about any other torrent clients. But the above list of trackers won’t work properly. In fact only the http based trackers will register because of the blank line. For all of the trackers to be used each tracker must have a blank line following it.

Like so:

So please if you’re going to post create a multi-tracker torrent at least list all of the trackers properly because it will only do any good if every peer in the swarm has all of the trackers listed in the torrent. Unfortunately most people treat bittorrent like a “set and forget” sort of file sharing protocol but if you setup one small part like that wrong everyone suffers and most people simply won’t notice.

It looks like Comcast is starting to roll out a data usage meter to customers in the Portland, OR area so they can gauge how far along they are in their 250GB per year limit. According to Gizmodo, Comcast says their median data usage is 2-4GB per month. I thought this was hilarious so I decided to do a little calculating of my own.

I’ve got a Linksys WRT-something-or-other router which I’ve installed DD-WRT on. Recent versions of the firmware have a section that keeps track of overall traffic through WAN that your router handles. It also makes it pretty easy to do a little calculation of your own with it since you can download the data in text format. It logs in terms of total data in and out per day of each month. November was my first full month of data excluding the the first of the month (something broke that day I guess), so I downloaded the log and looked at November’s data.

On average we downloaded 1917MB per day and uploaded 562MB per day. This is the total traffic between 3 people. Grand total we downloaded 54GB and uploaded 16GB. If we take a look at the ratio between the two I can approximate what our actual bandwidth is. We’re supposed to have a 20Mb down connection and the ratio suggests that our up bandwidth is ~5.86Mb which means our maximum upload rate is 750KB/s which we’ve never achieved before. When I use bittorrent to download Linux ISO’s I assume that in order to not choke our router with ACK’s I need to throttle the upload rate to about 70% of the maximum which hovers around about 120-130KB/s which is ~1Mb/s even and that’s only 70% of the max.

Basically I wouldn’t survive if I had Comcast and a 250GB limit per year.