BitTorrent - Suggestion

[Elvenstar]

Hiya,

I managed to download the 210MB client via BitTorrent and it was painfully slow at under 10kBps on average, that?s about 6 hours of download. I know it is not a problem at my end because I have just downloaded a 1GB file with the same BT client a few hours ago at the average speed of 40kBps (about 7hours), with much less seeds and peers than you have here.

A few things I noticed while downloading. First, even though there is a large number of seeds (~190) and peers (~490) my BT client (Azureus) can only connect to about a 15 of them at any time. The console shows lots of connection refused and end of stream errors. Also, all successful connections are Local only, there isn\'t any Remote peer or seed connections.

These symptoms remind me of those port 80 (the HTTP port) trackers that I encountered. My ISP uses transparent proxies, so even when I set my browser or any Internet apps for that matter, to connect to the Internet directly, they don\'t actually do that. All HTTP (port 80) connections go through a dynamically assigned proxy. I can usually get around the port 80 tracker problem by IP override in my BT client, but even that is a hit or miss, and download speed still suffers because other peers whose ISP had done the same thing didn\'t do what I did.

This lead me to believe that the port number used by your tracker, 6881 in this case, is also being put behind a proxy or firewall by my ISP. Since port 6881 is a well-known BT port, it isn\'t surprising to see most ISP\'s doing this or have some other measures to throttle it down so that it doesn\'t eat up most of their bandwidth. Btw, this is the reason I don\'t use port 6881 on my BT client either.

So I suggest that the admins or whoever in-charge of dealing with the tracker, change that port number to something less obvious then 6881 and 80, probably best to avoid popular database ports too.

For players or potential players using BitTorrent, I also suggest that you change your BT port to something else, like somewhere between 10000 and 65535, if it is currently set to 6881, this will solve most of the slow download problem, at your end that is.


Elvenstar

----------------------------------------
Ex-Veteran of UO, EQ
Ex-Apprentice of AO
Ex-Beta Tester of EnB, Al-Kardin, DaarkSpace
No time for these shit these days.

[waa]

I ended up getting the client from another site and am now going throught the painful long ordeal of updating.....



Its amazing to think this site cannot host a 220mb file from a http download.


If it where easier to download, or if they had other gaming sites hosting the file, more people might be playing, but then again this might be good at this time in development to curb  total players.

[SovHed]

Silence you ungrateful blob, lol
The reason they ask you to use Bit Torrent is to conserve bandwidth on their servers, which are all donated. Think about trying to get a webserver to serve that much: 220megx50000people=big pile of bytes. You must realise that they do not make money from this game as it is totally free. So just be grateful. oh and btw try bittorrent download in the evening as there are normally lots of good peers out there.
Oh and yes there are http donwloads if you look further down the download page!

[Telumehtar]

I know they are the spawn of the devil, but it\'s probably not beyond FilePlanet to host a mirror of PlaneShift. I\'m sure if they were sent it - they would host it, as would other \'Gaming Site Mirrors\'.

Of course, it all depends on whether the developers want to get the masses into this yet or not. The problem with getting too many \'regular gamers\' involved at this stage is that they will see the bugs, moan and complain, and not come back - because some wont realise (read: are too stupid to realise) that a beta is meant for finding bugs / testing the game engine.

Otherwise, I\'m sure if the call went out for some more mirrors, there would be some players that would be able to donate some space. Unfortunately, my web-host only has about 10-15Gb a month spare at the moment, which only equates to about 50 downloads a month.