Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

This new protocol uses packet latency based throttling instead of the packet loss based throttling of TCP.

I don't think the article documents any details. Maybe I missed a link.




Latency based congestion control already exists for TCP[1].

So my question is, why wouldn't you get the same effect by running BT on top of a network stack using Vegas?

Someone flash the tptacek signal!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_Vegas


It appears to me that if you use Vegas on your Linux machine then all of your TCP connections use Vegas, which will make you a second class citizen to all the Reno folk out there on the internet.

If you assume that your own uplink is the only bottleneck to be dealt with (say you are serving torrents over a DSL line) then this is reasonable, but I don't think I'd want to yield to all TCP users everywhere with all of my outgoing traffic.

There are also some scary comments in the notes from before it was rolled into the kernel, like the code doesn't handle route changes.

I can see why a vendor would choose something over which they have control.


why wouldn't you get the same effect by running BT on top of a network stack using Vegas?

You probably would, but Windows doesn't support Vegas.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/p2pi/current/msg00052.h...


The article doesn't mention details but in the comments, Simon links to the IETF working group on this: http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/ledbat-charter.html


Details of the protocol are here: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: