BitTyrant: making BitTorrent less fun for everyone (except you)

by Brad Linder Jan 4th 2007

Frustrated that your BitTorrent downloads aren't completing fast enough? BitTyrant is a new BitTorent client (based on Azureus 2.5) that claims to increase download performance by as much as 70%.

How does it work? Simple. When you start a download you start downloading a file, BitTyrant scans the upload speeds of other users and gives preference to those with higher upload speeds. Not only will you download the file faster by downloading from users with speedier uploads, but BitTyrant will reward users with faster upload rates by increasing your send rate to that user.

Real world example: You're downloading a file and are connected to a couple dozen users. Most of them are uploading at a rate of around 10 to 20 KBps. A few are uploading at 30 KBps or above. Those few are the ones that BitTyrant will give priority.

At first glance, this sounds like a win-win situation. You get your downloads faster, as do the users you're downloading from. But the problem is that this high-speed love-fest is cutting off users with slower connections. They were having a hard enough time downloading their files, and here you come with your high and mighty BitTyrant client just to ignore their pleas for peers to download from. The more users begin using clients like BiTyrant, the slower downloads will become for users with slower connections.

[via NewTeeVee]

Tags: bittorrent, bittyrant, download squad, DownloadSquad

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Rauglothgor said 7:24PM on 1-04-2007

"But the problem is that this high-speed love-fest is cutting off users with slower connections."

The info on there website paints a different picture. According to the website they are given a lower priority, not cut off. It also states on their webpage,
"However, our current BitTyrant implementation always contributes excess capacity, even when it might not improve performance."

This will surely impact slower connections but I don't think it is as dramatic as you make it seem. It will help curb the people who keep there upload rate low and their download rate wide open.

Anthony said 11:36PM on 1-04-2007

My question is whether or not I will be able to use Azureus plugins with BitTyrant. Mainly the SafePeer plugin. I don't feel safe downloading anything "questionable" without that in place.

David said 11:37PM on 1-04-2007

The standard bit-torrent protocol already implements the well-known tit-for-tat algorithm from the prisoner's dilemma in game theory. This causes all bit-torrent clients to provide more bandwidth to those that upload faster. You can read about how this works here:
http://tinyurl.com/srtez

Probably the most robust solution to the prisoner's dilemma when iterated over time, such as is the case with bit-torrent nodes accepting or denying requests for chunks of files, is for all parties to play it-for-tat.

So, BitTyrant might speed up the initial speed you get when downloading a file because it plays unfairly by favoring fast uploaders. But, once those slow uploaders become fast uploaders (getting more of the file or receiving fewer upload requests), BitTyrant clients will be at a disadvantage since they were unfair in the past.

The result is that those with a standard bit-torrent interface will already get the best speed possible over time (just not in the beginning).

I bet that simply increasing the number of simultaneous downloads in my client achieves the same performance boost that BitTyrant would be providing without the long-term performance hit.

More about tit-for-tat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

Michael Neel said 9:22AM on 1-05-2007

David is right - I don't know why this keeps getting coverage. Bit torrent doesn't allow abuses by design, if you try to game the system it will punish you for it over time. This is just as bad as the myth you can "leech" off of a torrent. Some of our "tech reporters" should read how the protocol works.

Harry Potter said 10:09AM on 1-05-2007

Good Idea Good Tech Thanx

muller said 2:27PM on 1-05-2007

Private trackers have already banned this client.

Shibathedog said 4:22PM on 1-11-2007

I can see this getting banned from private trackers pretty fast, ill have to check.

and for number 2, Download Peerguardian 2, it's more efficient and works with everything because it is its own app. So any app you have open will be filtered (Now you can use all the P2P networks!)

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