

BitMate - BitTorrent For The Less Privileged - raufrajar
http://www.dritte.org/bitmate.html

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CJefferson
This generally looks good, and sensible. There is only one piece that seems a
little dodgy. Sending back out parts of pieces before you have fully received
them.

I might be misunderstanding, but until a piece is fully received, you can't
hash it and check it is right. This could therefore lead to many clients
having partially incorrect pieces, if they keep passing it around.

I've found (and I'm not 100% sure why) that most bittorrent clients do find
they get some number of dodgy pieces over time, so this isn't just a
theoretical problem.

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umar_saif
Just saw the surging traffic on our download site and noticed the link from
HN.

Re: Aggressive sharing. Yes and no. If the torrent is encoded as a Merkle
tree, you can verify subsets of a piece. For torrents that only include piece-
level hashes, a BitMate client can upload an unverified piece. However, in our
experience, its rare for pieces to be corrupted (unless the uploader is
maliciously uploading corrupt pieces).

Please let us have your feedback regarding the performance and stability of
the client since this our first (read: pre-alpha) release.

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xiongchiamiov
This has nothing to do with either performance or stability, but the big
header saying "Downlowd link" spells download incorrectly.

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mhlakhani
This research seems quite interesting, however I see one problem here. The
BitMate client is fairly heavy, the download ranks in at 18MB. Getting this
out to users in low bandwidth areas becomes difficult due to this. Compare
this to uTorrent, which is just a 387kB download.

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umar_saif
Thank you for this input. We didn't want to change much in the most popular
Bittorrent client (Vuze) that we used for building this. You are right, we
will work on releasing a light (perhaps sans-UI) version of this soon ..

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ZoFreX
Perhaps you could compress it by releasing it as a patch to Vuze? That way
people who already have Vuze (which is fairly popular) can get it faster.

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umar_saif
Thanks, will do.

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zbowling
I may have to reverse the changes here and figure out how to apply it to the
transmission torrent client.

I'm on horrible hotel wifi or find myself a late seeder next to massive seed
boxes on whatever tracker I'm on. This would give a good bump in the ratio the
new guys and even things out if it works in theory.

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umar_saif
I am not sure what you mean by "reverse the changes", but if you want to
improve upload contribution for a low-bandwidth node, it is built into BitMate
(it improves both download performance and upload contribution of bittorrent).
Actually, for low-bandwidth nodes, it could improve upload contribution by as
much as 1000%! Please try out the client and let us know what you experience.

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mhlakhani
By "reversing the changes" I think the OP wants to add this in as a patch for
the Transmission, which is a popular open source BitTorrent client.

In fact I'd love to do that as well, given the chance.

EDIT: Just found out that it's open source, details here:
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitmate/develop>

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umair_waheed
Thank you for your interest. If you want I can upload the code as well to
sourceforge. The changes in vuze are very simple and minimal for now.

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xiongchiamiov
It'd be a hell of a lot easier for the rest of us to deal with if you upload
it to a more collaborative code hosting site instead (GitHub being the
prominent example). Even Google Code wouldn't be bad, though; SourceForge is
dead and gone.

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zbowling
My friends at sourceforge are going to be really sad to hear this after the
last re-hall of the entire site. :-)

