I have an idea about boosting one's downloading in a swarm, and wish
your kind evaluation and implementation.

Suppose I have several friends whose machines are often idle when I
want to download something via a torrent. These friend machines have
quite good broadband connection speed with my machine. Because of some
agreement between us, they allow me to signal their machines to join a
torrent of my interest.

So these friend machines automatically join a torrent when I do. But
this alone may not help boost my own downloading much. So, I would like
the friend machines and my machine to try download chunks different
from that of each other. As soon as these macihnes combined have all
the chunks, they can quit the torrent (doing so all of a sudden can
harm the rest of the swarm, so somebody advised me that they should
quit one by one in moderate intervals), and transfer their chunks that
I don't have yet to my machine. Of course we assume that downloading
these chunks via the torrent is slower than via the friends-to-me
broadband connections.

So, can this friend-machines-assisted approach make my downloading
faster than my machine alone in the torrent swarm?

Best Regards,
Yao Ziyuan

It seems you were allready kicked out of #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net and you tried the same approach on a bittorrent mailing list, without much success.

This might be a good approach to get things done for individual downloaders, however it hurts the swarm. You can try to implement it, but I don't think you will get much help from bittorrent client developers.

This is totally against the bittorrent protocol bootedcat. Implementing this feature is a security flaw for the whole system and it will hurt the protocol destructive.

Bittorrent is designed while learning of other p2p protocols. What you propose is really going back in time, and i think the internet has passed that stage.

What you could do, is get your buddy using a client that supports a friend upload slot. Although this is, again, not compatible with the bittorrent standard, it can boost the speed from your friends computer to yours.

/just my view as an user.

the idea has been implemented by "BTSlave": http://btslave.sourceforge.net/

[quote="George"]It seems you were allready kicked out of #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net and you tried the same approach on a bittorrent mailing list, without much success.

This might be a good approach to get things done for individual downloaders, however it hurts the swarm. You can try to implement it, but I don't think you will get much help from bittorrent client developers.[/quote]

bootedcat wrote:the idea has been implemented by "BTSlave": http://btslave.sourceforge.net/

I don't see much there about disconnecting when you and your friends have the torrent combined, which is screwing the swarm.

Perhaps a better idea would simply be to have like what Azureus has, which is infinite speed LAN transfers. That way you and your friends can download the file together and then transfer the bits to each other. Each client should still seed at least to a 1.0 ratio, though.

<nods until wednesday>