P2P agents for software distribution - saving the WAN from meltdown?!?

Wed Jun 18 15:21:42 UTC 2008

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:52:38AM -0400,
 Joe Abley <jabley at ca.afilias.info> wrote 
 a message of 41 lines which said:

> The behaviour I have observed with BitTorrent is that clients are
> handed a relatively short list of potential peers by the tracker,
> and it's quite common for sensible, close, local peers not to be
> included. My assumption has been that the set of potential peers
> passed to the client is assembled randomly.

I did not check seriously so I cannot confirm or deny but do note that
there are several proposals to improve "peer selection" behind random
sorting or crude measurements with ping on a few hosts. A summary of
existing work is on the ALTO Web site
<http://alto.tilab.com/resources.html>.

ALTO will have a BoF session at the next IETF in Dublin, so we may see
one day a standard protocol for peer selection.