Originally posted by: yukichigai
Originally posted by: MrBond
I'm honestly surprised it took someone this long to hire him. This sort of distributed system is exactly what downloadable media services need (like a box where you can "rent" movies by downloading them).
The only real disadvantage is that currently, BT will saturate a connection. If someone has a 15k/sec upload, it'll take it all and make browsing slow.
If that's not fixed for Steam (which is exactly what he'll be working on), it's going to piss a lot of people off when they can't play HL2 online because in the background Steam is distributing the latest patch to other people. They'll have to work in a way to prioritize certain traffic so it doesn't kill a connection.
It'll also get the attention of broadband providers, because the average user won't use all that much of their upload, but when little Johnny downloads HL2 over steam and it starts distributing it to other people who bought the game, it's going to rack up a lot of upload traffic. A constant 10k/upload for an entire month can push almost 26GB of data by my calculations. (10k/sec * 86400sec/day * 30days/month / 1,000,000k/gb)
I use burst!, which lets you put a cap on your upload speed and the number of simultaneous connections per download. I was sick of people eating 70k of my upload while I got about 15k download combined, probably because of having no open sockets to get any more download speed. :|
Azurues has been letting me do that for awhile. Granted theres a minimum upload of 5kBps, but when i have 1megabit upload, that's really not a big deal. And on a popular torrent I average anywhere from 100-450kBps through BT.