Bob's in-car films from mt washington

[Brett Dikeman]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Nate Stuart wrote:
> Yeah, it's chewing on it right now. But it is s...l...o...w a...s
> h...e...l...l
>
> Supposedly there are 4 other patricipants I am pulling the download from, yet I
> am only rec'ving at like 4k, this is through a cable modem! WTF!?!

Part of this is thanks to a number of your colleagues, who decided to just
download the files directly; the line only has 32KB/sec outbound, which
is exactly why I used swarmcast.  I have the logs, including IPs, of the
people who just did a little cutting+pasting.

Swarmcast works off of content other users already have, expecting them
to leave the app open for at least a little while.  Most people who
actually used swarmcast probably just quit the java app after
downloading, rather than contribute back.  If they did, then swarmcast
has nobody to pull content for you, and all 4 of you in the mesh could
easily be sitting at exactly the same point in the download.  The app
explains this if you try and close it, but I suspect most people just
closed it anyway.


> It also appears that the Swarmcast proggy is very proccessor intensive!?

No.  It is a java app, but it is QUITE capable of handling well over
150KB/sec on my pIII/600 laptop and it doesn't use more than about 10-15%
of the CPU while doing so.  If you go to www.opencola.com and try
their sample download, it's quite impressive(although when I just tried
it, I was the only downloader, so I had the T1 to myself.)  If you file a
bug report, they do read them(I made a few feature suggestions, and I got
a personal email back about a week later from a staffer.)

> Running win 2k I wtched the CPU load crank up to 100% and sit there as it yanks
> the files through at the blistering 4kps speed. I have other d/l managers that
> work in similar ways that can pull 100 times that for B/W and draw WAY less on
> the system...

"Similar ways?"  I'm not aware of any other "download manager"(which
Swarmcast is not) that do streaming from a dynamic pool of users...with
one exception, iMesh, which will stream a file from multiple users but
it's a P2P system.


> Impressed I am not at this point.

Nor am I with your attitude towards something that was done with good
intentions, cost nothing to you, and was done out of the graciousness of
my heart and as a favor to Bob but failed because of the users who
decided to just use the URL directly.  Hell, even the swarmcast listing
service was free, and the software was free(it's even open-source now.)

I warned people that if they cheated, I'd yank the file.  They did, so I
yanked it.  These were not, by majority, people with unusual OS's like
Frank, either.  IE 5, Netscape 4.7x on windows platforms were the
majority of people who cheated(instructions were quite clear, to not
cheat and access the file directly.)  Yup, the wonder of looking through
the webserver logs.

Whether I wanted to put it back up or not, the file wouldn't be
around this weekend onwards anyway.  The system is going by-bye until I
get DSL up in my new apartment, which could be a few weeks.

Brett