Hi there, I have been using Ktorrent for just over a year now and have seen a lot of improvement.

One thing I would like to see is the ability to limit Ktorrent to only upload/download from people listed in the same country as you in the GeoIP database. And maybe a feature to just prioritize local peers.

The reason for this is that here in New Zealand we are charged silly amounts per megabyte for international traffic, yet local traffic is almost free. By doing this it would allow people here to significantly reduce their monthly bandwidth bills.

I believe this is the same in other countries especially in the Pacific countries, Australia and some of the smaller European countries.

It would increase speeds as well.

Just my 2c.

Regards,


Andrew

We could add that feature after the port to KDE 4, though it isn't really that simple, all the GeoIP stuff is part of a plugin. The actual download code is not aware of the country of a peer. So it would require some architectural changes.

That would be awesome if you could pick the countries you wanted to download from.

As part of my recent (unsuccessful) research as to why my upload speed is several times my download speed, I've noticed a lot of TCP retransmissions with the same peers. While accessing TCP stats may well be non-trivial, if we do I think they'd be a good component when calculating peer quality. (If we assume transmission rate, latency and error rate are good metrics) This would favor faster, local-er links while impairing distant, unstable links.

Since Intl. links are statistically more likely to experience packet loss, this might well get us most of the way to "country-specific" as well...

In the worst case metered users wouldn't be paying to transmit the same info twice (or more), no?

-Greg

Given KTorrent's *ix orientation and the prevalence of libpcap, this might not be such a big deal...

Additionally, on the GeoIP side, you might be able to statically generate a table of "hop weights" (In the IP routing sense), or perhaps a white/black list... This would only need to happen when initializing the client...

Amazing, I can't believe some ISPs do this. Its like they missed the entire point of the internet.

It just occurred to me though, this would be an interesting feature for those countries with different intellectual property laws. The question is, do we want to support their isolation?

It can't be too hard to loop through a GeoIP table with a perl script and generate IPTables rules from it, right?


Wow I need to stop suggesting iptables hacks!

I like the idea of the GeoIP country weightings, this should allow users to prioritize a particular country. It would be preferable to do this from a plugin where it lists all countries and you can assign a weight to them.

And yes, it is annoying having these silly limits imposed on us by the ISP's but I guess thats what you get when you are the arsehole of the world and 50000kms from anything with good connectivity.