I find it, still, undesirable that LAN peers found on Zeroconf are still subject to being choked by each other. I started one torrent and got it up to 50% (~5GB or so), and figured I might as well add a second one into the mix. Zeroconf successfully detected the other peer, and started bursting 5-6MB/s (I was happy) but soon it was choked. So in the end there were bursts of transfer, then choking. I don't think having the LAN peer helped at all towards the overall download speed.


I repeated the experiment with Azureus's LAN peer finder and found it worked extremely effectively. Their LAN peers bypass the choke and constantly keep each other up to date on the torrent (even having independent speed limits). As far as I can tell, there is no overlap in chunk downloads either, which is nice for those who want to use multiple clients but not waste bandwidth on the external side.

Would it be extremely difficult to make these modifications to KTorrent?

That was one of the modifications I wanted to do on the zeroconf plugin, but I never got around to it.

It shouldn't be that difficult, but ideally you would want this for all peers on your own LAN, not just the ones you find via zeroconf.

jdong wrote:I find it, still, undesirable that LAN peers found on Zeroconf are still subject to being choked by each other. I started one torrent and got it up to 50% (~5GB or so), and figured I might as well add a second one into the mix. Zeroconf successfully detected the other peer, and started bursting 5-6MB/s (I was happy) but soon it was choked. So in the end there were bursts of transfer, then choking. I don't think having the LAN peer helped at all towards the overall download speed.


I repeated the experiment with Azureus's LAN peer finder and found it worked extremely effectively. Their LAN peers bypass the choke and constantly keep each other up to date on the torrent (even having independent speed limits). As far as I can tell, there is no overlap in chunk downloads either, which is nice for those who want to use multiple clients but not waste bandwidth on the external side.

Would it be extremely difficult to make these modifications to KTorrent?

I have found that when I need to utilize the zeroconf plugin, in order to allow some choke of upstream to 90% of my available up-bandwidth I unchoke the client itself and manually choke all torrents not needing LAN in order to maintain some assurance that not all of my upstream is being used up. Unless I do not need to surf the net when this takes place, then I just let-er-rip.

Another option is shut down all torrents except those needed by the LAN and restart them when the LAN torrents are done.

An addition I would like to see is the ability to utilize two or more different ethernet cards. This way not only could a person set different chokes for LAN/WAN connections, but one could if they desired route LAN traffic over a separate card and help maintain the WAN speeds while under heavy LAN load -- Essentially boosting both LAN/WAN torrent connections to their fullest potential.