Empirically "alot" of seeds would be > 10000. Some torrents with a lot of seeds today are:
OpenSolaris install DVD 195000 Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop 60000 No Country for Old Men 21000 The Mist 20000 etc. You can see some rough statistics at torrent search sites like btjunkie.org. BT clients won't always seed if there is a high enough share ratio. (Excuse the odd terminology, this is from the utorrent UI.) So that's one reason not everyone seeds. Another one is just the clutter in the BT client. i.e. Every active torrent takes up a line in the UI. And a third reason is that every seed takes up some of your uplink bandwidth. I tend to think that most users are not particularly concerned with the piracy aspect, even after the recent court decision in the states in favour of the RIAA. Many countries don't provide the same level of copyright protection to content creators as the U.S. does. But I will try and get some data one of these days.... 8-) Bill. On 3/11/08, David Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What's "a lot" of seeds? If a million people download a particular > file, is a lot a hundred? A thousand? The question is, why not a > million seeds? (The answer to that question is "because then a million > people are vulnerable; better to only have a few high-risk people stick > out their necks.") > > My point is only a tiny fraction of total downloaders actually stick > around as persistent seeds. Maybe 1%? 0.1%? That means somewhere > between 99% and 99.9% of potential swarm capacity is thrown away in > order to preserve the pirates' anonymity. > > That's cool -- I'm not dissing bittorrent. It's truly brilliant. It's > just designed for piracy. That's fine -- the best technology often is. > But let's not pretend otherwise. > > -david > > PS: The one possible explanation for the Bittorrent design that doesn't > implicate it in catering to pirates is it's the only design that works > in an open-source, multi-implementation environment where you generally > can't trust your peers: tit-for-tat is built for a paranoid world and > thus can survive when that world is reality. I'm sure this design goal > plays a factor. But I suspect its legal protections are a much bigger > reason for its widespread adoption. > > Bill Mccormick wrote: > > On 3/11/08, David Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I agree a well-seeded torrent can be pretty quick. But the > >> protocol/clients/users only seed for a very limited time, or not at all. > >> The result is most torrents are poorly seeded, and thus slower than > >> downloading from a well-provisioned webserver. Said another way, > >> Bittorrent generally sacrifices speed in order to protect pirates. > >> > > > > > > --> I'll check that one the next time I'm downloading a smaller > > torrent. I have the impression that alot of seeds are long term > > persistant. But no data to back it up yet. > > > > Bill > > _______________________________________________ > > p2p-hackers mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > p2p-hackers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers > -- Bill McCormick _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
