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Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology! |
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08-04-04, 02:20 AM | #1 |
Posts: n/a
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file swarming?????????????????
I am just wondering...
How does p2p networks implement multi-sourced download, i.e. downloading the same file from multiple sources. P2P is something that realy interest me- I am doing a small research about it Now, I understand UDP would be a very good protocol for implementing this. but still as a programmer I have many questions. Anyone who knows a good site that explains how does multi-sourced download works - please give me a link. its the only thing missing for me to completly understand how p2p works. Many thanks in advance, SIJP |
08-04-04, 03:29 AM | #2 |
Madame Comrade
Join Date: May 2000
Location: Area 25
Posts: 5,587
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Hi sijp and welcome to P2P-Zone.
The typical way to handle multisourced downloads is to treat each shared file as a collection of regular size chunks. For example, you could have a 5 MB file split into 50 chunks, each 100 kB in size. When you have downloaded all the chunks belonging to a particular file, you can join them together and voilą - you have a complete file. So instead of requesting a whole file from a sharer you request only the chunks you need. And you can download different chunks of the same file simultaneously from different people, which usually results in a faster total download speed. As you may receive chunks for a large file from hundreds of different sources, data integrity becomes an important issue. This is typically handled with a method called hashing. A specific, hard-to-forge hash number is calculated for each chunk belonging to a file, and the downloaders can use this number to check that they have received a chunk with correct content. If some source seems to send a lot of false chunks, the p2p program can block that source as a hostile peer and get the chunks from other sources. - tg |
08-04-04, 04:19 AM | #3 |
Dawn's private genie
Join Date: May 2001
Location: the Canadian wasteland
Posts: 4,461
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You can easily see what TankGirl said by going into an Overnet temp folder. You'll see a movie broken down into 75 parts for example.
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08-04-04, 07:24 AM | #4 |
Earthbound misfit
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
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What I want to know is how WinMX handles its multisource transfers. Even when recieving from ten differents sources the file always downloads from begining to end, not in random chunks; it acts like a single source download. It does seem to use a bit more upstream bandwidth during downloads and lots of processor time too; mayby it makes dozens of 5K or 10K transfer requests per second and keeps a close watch to make sure the chunks download in the right order.
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