On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Stig Meireles Johansen <sti...@gmail.com> wrote: > But some ISP's throttle TCP-connections (either by design or by simple > oversubscription and random packet drops), so many small connections *can* > yield a better result for the end user. And if you are so unlucky as to > having a crappy connection from your country to the download-site, maybe, > just maybe someone in your own country already has downloaded it and is > willing to share the torrent... :) > I can saturate my little 1M ADSL-link with torrent-downloads, but forget > about getting throughput when it comes to HTTP-requests... if it's in the > country, in close proximity and the server is willing, then *maybe*.. but > else.. no way.
There are plenty of downloading tools that will use range requests to download a signal file with parallel connections… But if you are running parallel connections to avoid slowdowns you're just attempting to cheat TCP congestion control and get an unfair share of the available bandwidth. That kind of selfish behaviour fuels non-neutral behaviour and ought not be encouraged. We offered torrents in the past for commons picture of the year results— a more popular thing to download, a much smaller file (~500mb vs many gbytes), and not something which should become outdated every month… and pretty much no one stayed connected long enough for anyone else to manage to pull anything from them. It was an interesting experiment, but it indicated that further use for these sorts of files would be a waste of time. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
