Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released 521
wintermute1974 writes "After sitting at a stable release of 3.4.2 since last spring, Bram Cohen's official BitTorrent client has been upgraded to version 4. In addition to its existing, rock-steady functionality, BitTorrent now sports a new queue-based UI. The revision details are on the BitTorrent site. Packets are now marked as bulk data too, which is significant considering that about a third of all Internet traffic is currently torrent data."
The 'bulk data' tag (Score:5, Informative)
I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads? Will this help solve VoIP realtime bandwidth issues? Will the 'good net citizen' vibe surrounding writing the 'bulk data' flag into ones code overshadow potentially making ones users into second-class net citizens?
Or will this not be a big deal at all?
Probably some of everything, I suppose.
Link and Changelog (Score:5, Informative)
The actual link is to the download is here [bittorrent.com].
The changelog:
Re:meh (Score:3, Informative)
Different License (Score:5, Informative)
It's complient with the Open Source Definition. Not huge shaking news it seems like.
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:3, Informative)
Better yet, now that BT 4.0.0 uses GTK instead of wxWidgets (as per the release notes), will this hamper the OS X frontend?
The only other OS X native BT frontend I know is Tomato Torrent [sarwat.net] ... but that's just a tweaked 3.4.2 build. CLI / X Windows here I come...
Where is the OS X version? (Score:1, Informative)
I haven't heard so much as a peep regarding the new Mac version during the dev of the latest Windows client. Can anyone give us an ETA on 4.0 for OS X?
Looks Slick (Score:2, Informative)
Tried it out throwing down some linux torrent simultaneously.
Downloads save to the desktop by default (although editable) and look like Firefox's Download Manager with details, progress bars, etc. Really nice because opening up 5 torrents used to mean 5 seperate windows. Client worked fine on most of the trackers given by A Quick Google Search [google.com].
Download it quick! I'm sure someone will torrent the executable...
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:5, Informative)
This makes sense though, because it simply works incredibly, and they're probably working on some bigger things now for a new version. It's stabilized quite nicely, better than any closed-source software out there lately!
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Bulk data? (Score:2, Informative)
--
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Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox [freegamingsystems.com]
Wired article as proof [wired.com]
Re:Bulk data? (Score:5, Informative)
Now, taking these one at a time. VoIP has certain needs: it needs a certain amount of bandwidth, and its data must be transferred within a short period of time, or it becomes unusable. A VoIP connection is generally held for of the order of minutes, so quick setup of a connection is not a high priority. HTTP needs quick setup/teardown, because you have one connection for each file (typically kilobytes in size; yes, I know that later versions of HTTP can transfer multiple files within one connection), but latency is not a huge concern; bandwidth might be, depending on the data. FTP is an interesting beast: low latency and low bandwidth for commands, but high bandwidth and don't-care latency for data. Setup/teardown times not a major issue. NNTP needs high bandwidth, but latency is not a concern at all. SMTP usually needs low bandwidth, and latency isn't a major issue, as long as the message gets through. SSH needs low latency, but bandwidth needs are generally low.
You have a relatively small pipe to the rest of the Internet. There are high demands on this pipe. How do you decide what gets pushed through, and what gets dropped, or delayed until later?
BitTorrent marking its packets as bulk means that quality of service systems can say "These packets aren't of major importance; they can be deferred until later". So the short-term throughput of BT is reduced, for the benefit of others who need the pipe for applications like VoIP (for example). When those other applications reduce their demands, BT is able to transfer its data.
The understanding is simple: the urgency in the transfer of data via bittorrent is low, so if bandwidth is at a premium, the routers can drop, or throttle, the bittorrent data to make room for high priority data. It's the same principle as FedEx uses: if you have stuff that needs to be moved FAST, you pay a price premium, and it gets moved on the next plane, bumping off some low-urgency, low-price cargo to the plane afterwards. If there's a lot of high priority and low priority traffic, such that the low priority traffic is building up faster than it can be moved, it's time for FedEx to buy more planes, or start not accepting low priority traffic -- or, in the ISP business, to buy a fatter pipe.
Hope this helps.
Control? (Score:5, Informative)
He probably just wants to offer a product he can be proud of, maybe so people will appreciate his work and choose to support him.
Re:nobody should be at the front of the line (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Bulk data? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:GI JOE PSAs (Score:3, Informative)
http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=gijoe-
and more can be found at
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/gijoe.html
It's one of those were either you laugh your ass off or become disturbed at the amount of free time people have. Personally I laugh my ass off.
Re:The 'bulk data' tag (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they'll choke "bulk data", because many other protocols mark their data bulk as well (ftp being one of them, if you have a modern client).
It is very helpful to ISPs to have the bulk classification, so that their more time-sensitive data (ie, VOIP) doesn't get clobbered when someone starts using bittorrent.
It's not like it's difficult to choke bittorrent traffic anyway, just look for communication on ports 6881 to 6888.
If they do, it'll just make everyone remove the bulk flag, and then there will be no easy quality of service queing.
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:2, Informative)
The official client's new interface is streamlined and simple. It installs in a second (literally). It has all of the options that I need (I'm a simple man, I just want to download some files). And it never asks me annoying questions while I'm just trying to download something.
In short, the new interface is great; I wholeheartedly recommend it (unless you have a fetish for tabs and arcane configuration dialogs, in which case by all means continue using Azureus).
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:5, Informative)
(Note: This may not be 100% accurate, IANAL, I am not responsible, etc, etc.)
Re:Initial impressions... (Score:4, Informative)
So if already content with Azureus or BitComet or whatever, nothing to see here... Move along folks.
- shadowmatter
Re:ABC (Score:4, Informative)
Re:...ever feature except speed (Score:3, Informative)
Azureus works fine-- no big performance problems at all. I can download and my wife can still use iTunes and MS Word at the same time. Azureus maxes out our DSL connection, but that's the network, and all computers are affected.
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:5, Informative)
HTH,
petard
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot staff should be ashamed to have promoted it like they did. They did 2 or 3 articles about it, as if it were some great tech sent from the heavens.
Besides the fact that the very notion of it is what's wrong with the internet, and why the government will eventually regulate the hell out of it. The entire point is to trade warez. I did an eXeem search for linux, and didn't get one result - so don't give me some bullshit about slackware isos. Society are like kindergarteners, they had a little freedom, and blew it. Now we're all going to be grounded.
Actually, is that why michael left? It wasn't long after he "wrote" a couple "eXeem is great! get your warez on eXeem!" articles that he left.
Re:Bulk data? (Score:5, Informative)
No. In order for users to voluntarily mark their packets as "bulk data", there has to be a benefit for them. That benefit is supposed to be higher overall transfer rate. The tradeoff is higher latency. So a router that receives a BitTorrent packet and a VOIP packet at the same time would send the VOIP packet first to reduce latency, and queue the BitTorrent packet for afterwards. But if the queue is full it would *not* preferentially drop the BitTorrent packet because that would reduce throughput. In fact, if the queue has many VOIP packets, the router should preferentially drop incoming VOIP packets, because it would not be able to send them with low latency anyway. This limits VOIP throughput, which is fine. In fact that's the result we want: VOIP = low latency low throughput, BitTorrent = high latency high throughput.
At least, I hope this is how ISPs implement routing for packets marked as bulk data, because otherwise it will never be adopted.
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Idea: Streaming Torrent (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:2, Informative)
quick explanation (Score:1, Informative)
But your comment is still completely irrelevant to the question of the specifics of why bitorrent has a custom open-source license.
The best answer you're going to get is by reading it, line for line.
A quick answer on WHY the license is needed, is:
- unlike the BSD / MIT licenses, it requires to you make source code modifications to the bittorrent code available to the public.
- unlike the GPL it does not require you to make the rest of your [non-bittorrent] source code available, if bittorrent is integrated into your project.
- it includes a provision to void the entire license if you file a patent claim against the bittorrent code / its author.
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:1, Informative)
I used qtorrent before, which has significantly less features, because as you say: java for linux sucks.
If you can't for the life of it use a console interface, then it's your own fault. Also, I heard, people are planning on writing guis for the libtorrent library.
The new BitTorrent license isn't simple or brief. (Score:3, Informative)
There is considerably more in the new BitTorrent license than in either of those licenses. Among other things, the new BitTorrent license specifies which licenses can be used as sublicenses and how much one can charge for distributing the source code of sublicensed derivatives.
Pride in one's work doesn't come from a license and people aren't going to give him money because of the license.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Looks Slick (Score:3, Informative)
Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent at Stanford.
Update: 3/7/2005, The torrent in this entry was just audio only, but Thomas Winningham has gotten permission from both Bram and Stanford ("Stanford holds copyright on the material but returns the copyright immediately to the speaker, that is, Bram. Get him to agree and go ahead.") to post their video as a torrent on Prodigem. Cool! Updated again since that video posted seems to only have the first 10 minutes. Anyway, the audio is below, or just check out my notes.
Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent yesterday at Stanford. I had planned to make video from it available, but the video I captured somehow got corrupted (boo Panasonic). I salvaged the audio from the video and have released that via a torrent under a creative commons license (with Bram's approval). The audio is a bit low. It's okay, though, as I didn't realize that Stanford would be making it's video available to the general public (though in crummy windows streaming format). Here are some notes:
- Academic setting
- benchmarking is hard because it needs to be like the internet (buy a bad router)
- key problem among swarming software is how to get everyone involved to maximize upload, people don't realize
- Single seeder problem
- must be careful not to at first trade with people who are likely to disappear
- Bit Torrent extremely non-cooperative
- each peer in it for himself
- tit for tat
- editorial note: isn't this cooperative? Peter Kollock: tit for tat as the optimal cooperative strategy
- How to deal with people behind and not behind NAT
- Centralized tracker is needed to produce randomized graph so as to avoid
network segmentation
- gossip (peers telling peers about other peers with content) very easily segments the network such that pieces of the content get isolated into islands
- Choking Algorithm
- sophistication
- people like to pretend it doesn't exit
- lots of use of made up magic numbers
- eg. how long to wait for reciprication?
- motivation opaque
- methodology (the traditional approach) is Bram firing up a client and observing behavior
- lots of room for study
- TCP does not look like RPC calls (BitTorrent treats TCP like a black box)
- don't avoid making a state machine, because no matter what you'll end up with a state machine anyway
- why threads are a bad idea
- Magic numbers
- makes them up based on what works
- pulls them from his "magic ass"
- if you need a magic number feel free to ask him for one
- Estimated Time Left Algorithm
- never gotten any fan mail on how well it works
- lots of effort and thought put into making this work sanely
- any time you see a computer telling you time left it is lieing
- research needs to be done on better algorithms
- would gladly place your better algorithm into bit torrent
- problem at end about going down 2 seconds per every 1 second
- tradeoff between smoothness now vs. smoothness later
- Current Transfer Rate Algorithm
- its a mess
- very important for tit-for-tat to work
- Bad idea to be downloading too many torrents at one time (e.g. 5)
- Peers at first never randomly tried new connections
- added optimistic unchoke to solve this
- if new person recipricates then continue
- otherwise move on to the next person
- may unchoke 4 or 7 clients depending
- it's voodoo
- nobody has seriously studied this
- Piece Selection Algorithm
- trade off between finishing the piece you are currently downloading vs going after a more valuable piece
- priority is currently finishing a piece you started even if many others have it
- downloading from the beginning of the content for everyone is a maximally bad strategy
Q: Who has w
DL legal stuff please :) (Score:2, Informative)
Wired CD
libtorrent (Score:2, Informative)
In practice, it doesn't leak resources like all the python/java/etc implementations do, and its interactive ncurses client is the best bittorrent one I know of. It does also use our well-known GP L :).
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Informative)
btdownloadmanycurses running under a screen session means that I can have my torrents up and downloading as long as my machine stays up.
If I accidentally crash X whilst playing doom3 (or whatever) it does not hurt my torrents.
In fact I can download
Usually the stuff has downloaded by the time I get home again, and I can listen to them immediately (live concerts from easytree). Try that with any of the facny GUI clients
License and copyright (Score:3, Informative)
The *only* thing that allows you to redistribute the code is the license. So it is in your own interest to defend the license.
Of course, if you don't redistribute the code, you don't have to accept the license. The GPL is very specific about this, but it is true for all licenses. Or used to be, apparently there is a trend in some juristictions to consider the transfer of the program from harddisk to ram in order to run the code to be covered by copyright (very much against the spirit of copyright law), which mean accepting these licenses will be needed if you just want to run the program.
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why The Official Client Matters (Score:2, Informative)
I use CTorrent [sourceforge.net], a console torrent client in plain C. Feature is a bit limited, but it works and has relatively small footprint.
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why The Official Client Matters (Score:3, Informative)
> quality POSIX C client. Maybe the OpenBSD guys
> will eventually get around to OpenBT?
Well there is C BitTorrent client. A bit stagnated (meaning developement/releases) but it works usually and is under GPL so it is nice base to start off.
http://ctorrent.sourceforge.net/
Keep in mind that this client is writen in *nix way - meaning that it does not have fancy GUI at all, it does not do queue etc. - it just gets torrents.
I've used to use ctorrent, but now I am only using BTQueue which is very extended original BitTorrent client. It has queue abilities, gives loads of info, can do throttling etc. extremely configurable. It is a bit raw but can be used once you get used to it.
http://btqueue.sourceforge.net/
It even exports WebService with ACL for full control.
Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:4, Informative)
-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true
This will activate the opengl pipeline [sun.com] for Java2D calls. (Swing uses Java2D for all rendering...)
Re:Bulk data? (Score:4, Informative)
No, the benefit is that their Internet connection remains usable for interactive traffic instead of slowing to a crawl due to the BitTorrent traffic. (The overall transfer rate is likely to be the same either way.) You don't stop using the Internet just because you're downloading something, do you?
If you're not using your connection for anything else, BitTorrent can max out the bandwidth, with or without the bulk data flag. If you have other traffic, the TCP/IP stack will have to make room in the stream of data for those other packets sooner or later -- and when those packets go through really won't affect the final download time because latency is of little importance. However, it may be critical to the other traffic, so it's best to label the bulk data to keep it from being prioritized before more urgent packets.
Really, the only reason not to use the flag is because such traffic could be easily singled out for blocking. However, such action would be foolish, since people would just stop marking the data as "bulk" if that caused it to get dropped. This would cause all the bulk data to be transferred as if it were time-critical interactive traffic, defeating the value of the flag altogether. (Email can be marked as bulk email, but do spammers use that flag? Of course not! They know they'll be blocked.)
It's best for everyone if all bulk data is labelled, the routers prioritize it intelligently, and nobody blocks bulk data transfers.
Re:The 'bulk data' tag (Score:3, Informative)
The reason being, IIRC, is that Microsoft decided not to play "good net citizen" and the Windows IP stack sets outgoing packets as 0x10 (or other similar "high priority" category) no matter what.
Re:Bulk data? (Score:3, Informative)
Set an upload cap on your BT client if you don't want it killing your connection, or replace your router with a Linux box that has more intelligent packet filtering. (Specifically, if you know your upstream cap, you can set up the Linux box to be the actual upstream bottleneck and not the cable modem, and when the router is the upstream bottleneck, it's a lot easier to prioritize packets effectively.)
Also some BT clients support automatic upstream detection. The way they do it is by measuring your latency to a few sites, if they see the latency spike, they throttle themselves back until latency goes down.
Re:libtorrent (Score:4, Informative)
When I started writing my OS X client (Shameless plug: Hurricane [keeto.net]. Early beta.) I shopped around for BT libraries and found libtorrent to be better documented than LibTorrent (Sheesh - could that naming issue be any more confusing?). Also, the developer community seems very receptive and active - always a good thing!
Cool Features? Sure! It runs all torrents over a single port in a background thread, offers configuration and stats for damned near everything BT can do, 'fast resume' data for quickly restarting a download and various other niceties.
And great documentation - a rarity for an OSS project
Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:3, Informative)