BitTorrent vs The Internet

I'm sure that you've heard me laud BitTorrent before. "It checksums!" I say. "It's a failure-tolerant distributed file-sharing model!" I'll claim. And yet, for all its benefits, sometimes BitTorrent alone just isn't enough.

Take TWiT for instance. TWiT is "This Week in Tech", the weekly Leo Laporte podcast that gets him doing a 50+ minute round table talk with a rotating cast of his former coworkers from TechTV, primarily the series "The Screen Savers". Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, David Prager, and Robert Herron all make regular appearances on TWiT.

It's a popular podcast.

So popular in fact, that within hours of a new podcast being released on http://twit.tv/, the site goes down. Hard. Leo is a smart guy, and he like choices. So each podcast is available in a variety of formats, primarily MP3, AAC, and Ogg, as both BitTorrent files and regular downloads.

And, of course, all this variety means that the site eats up a ton of bandwidth. So much so, in fact, that even if you're polite and you download the BitTorrent file, the twit.tv tracker itself goes offline. So BitTorrent can't actually help you here!

This is mitigated in two ways: 1) Leo learns to separate his services into http://files.twit.tv and http://tracker.twit.tv:6969/. Or 2) use BitTorrent with DHT, or some other trackerless method. Bram Cohen has an experimental 4.1.x-branch of his Mainline BitTorrent client, and uTorrent and Azureus both support distributed tracker mechanisms. Don't ask me how they work; I don't know yet. But even as twit.tv is down for the next several hours, my Ogg is building up. Slowly, yes: it's at 54.7% and climbing like a snail, but it is climbing.