Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

BitTorrent is slow

Bill Bumgarner was kind enough to submit etree packages for Fink/MacOS X; in his Weblog article he also has some links to the recording of Grateful Dead's show at Boston Garden in 1973.

On Saturday, I hastily started to install the tools on my Powerbook. After a first unsuccessful try, I pinged Bill to find out that I need to upgrade to the unstable Fink to be able to install his packages. After the upgrade, flac would still not compile. Instead of trying to figure out what's wrong, I decided to install them on one of my Linux boxes at home. Installing the BitTorrent client required compiling and installing wxPython first (I couldn't find RPM for my not-so-old Mandrake system :(, so I had to do that first.

As soon as I had the BitTorrent client compiled, I started the Grateful Dead download. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that downloading 966Mb would take about 2 days! The download rate was only around 10kb/sec, which is more than twenty times slower than that of a typical download from home! Only by Monday morning I had the show completely downloaded :(

Incidentally, if you like Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and friends, a much better source for their music is gdlive.com. It includes both shn files and pre-made MP3 which are great for listening on an iPod. If you decide to download the shn files, you'll need to install shntool, shorten and the etree-scripts. The last package contains scripts to make easy burning audio CD using cdrecord. On Linux this is a no-brainer; on MacOS X it should be easy as well, once you have Bill's packages. Otherwise just compile the sources from scratch, it should work just fine.