Local Peer Discovery - Best new uTorrent Feature
One of the features that I’ve been anxiously awaiting is the “Local Peer Discovery” feature in uTorrent 1.7x. Basically, it uses a multicast to discover bittorrent clients that are active on your local network. It can determine if they are seeding or leeching a torrent that you’re interested in. If it’s available on the network, it will try to use it as a peer, and download it at massive speeds.
I can think of a couple of really great uses for this. The first is a scenario that I run into at work occasionally. I’ll try to download a video or file that a co-worker wants to see as well. Instead of competing for bandwidth, we can now both download it at the same time, and share the pieces quickly and automatically.
The other great use that I’m really excited about is LAN parties. For those of you that don’t know, a common LAN party problem is that everyone wants to get a copy of a game off of one computer. Everyone tries to copy it at one time, effectively rendering the network and the hard drive useless. The current solution is to copy it to some computers, and then have people get it from the copies. It works, but it’s manual, and it’s not fun.
Along comes bittorrent to the rescue. Before you’re next lan party, create torrents for all of your games or maps, or whatever, and distribute the tiny torrents. You can even send them to each user via email before the party. As people show up, they can start the torrent, and they automatically become a server AND a client. It effectively uses everyone’s hard drive and connection and you sit back and wait. I have yet to try it at a LAN party, but I think it will work very well. You could even throttle the connection and let it run while you play other games.
I did actually verify that the feature works as expected. On one computer in my network, I set up a distributed trackerless torrent. I set that machine up as a seeder. I loaded the torrent on another machine, it auto-discovered the other machine, and downloaded at a great speed. It wasn’t exactly distributed, but it demonstrated that it does work.
I’m anxiously awaiting the next LAN party when I can try it out.
It’s just a shame uT1.7.x is banned on so many trackers…
well that’s just because them trackers are stoopid enough to listen to rumors about bad behaviors…
Btw: æTorrent is at 1.7.5 now
uT is at 1.8.1 now
excellent post. i’ve been thinking of doing this during lan parties not only for its ease of distributing bandwidth but also for data integrity. when the wireless router kicks my computer off the network, it’s nice to be able to resume right where the transfer left off
My roommate and i recently discovered this by accident.
I had a video i had downloaded the previous night seeding on my computer.
So my roommate gets the file the next morning and he comes bursting in my room sayin “omg, you gotta come look at this! utorrent is DLing at 8 MB/s!!!
So of course i was amazed, we checked the peer list and see my internal ip on there and we had a nice facepalm moment.
now we use it whenever we want to transfer something within our network, and sometimes we “double team” a torrent… probably doesnt help at all but it’s cool to see the spikes in the graph when chunks get passed between us.
It actually would help DL faster when you have multiple local PC’s. Because 1 PC usally never connects to all seeders. So you might end up with 1 PC connected to one set of seeders while the other PC’s are connected to a different set. Most likely you’ll have some over lap connections.