2008/4/15, Simetrical wrote:
In principle, TCP should ensure reliable byte-for-byte delivery, but that's in principle. :) I'd be interested to know if BitTorrent is significantly more reliable than HTTP in practice.
It's more reliable in the way that when bittorrent tells you it has finished, you have the original, complete file. If you got something corrupted, it automatically redownloaded the corrupted chunks.
Nicolas Dumazet wrote:
Surely BT will check that the file you get is the same than the seeded one. But it is not "more reliable" than a direct download : you don't know if the seeded file matches the original file. The user sharing it likely downloaded it using HTTP : in this case using BT or a direct HTTP download gets you as much chances to get corrupted data.
Well, if the person creating the torrent didn't check that what it downloaded matched the hashes, something is quite wrong.
And even if bittorrent assured you about it, it's not a bad practise to check it against the original hashes.