On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 11:21:55AM -0500, William Hooper wrote: > > doesn't bittorrent work better when there are more people using it? > > shouldn't everybody be using the same torrent? > > In theory, yes everybody should be using the same torrent. In practice, > though, having a torrent for two geographical locations (one Americas, one > Europe) prevents your torrent client from having to go over the slow, > across the ocean links. The problem are not "slow transoceanic links" per se as I hardly experience any congestion issue on those nowadays. The problem is the delay those longhaul links generate, and thus limit TCP performance massively. Ever seen FTP with more than about 3mbit/s transatlantic? No? This is NOT because of a lack of bandwidth! So the aim of seperating trackers is not avoiding small bandwidth links, but high RTT (delay) links, which directly affects TCP performance. Best regards, Daniel -- CLUE-RIPE -- Jabber: dr@xxxxxxxxxx -- dr@IRCnet -- PGP: 0xA85C8AA0