On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote: I think that the advantage of BT is not the speed, but the fact that it handles data corruption far better (but slower) than HTTP.
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.
I have not yet had data corruption with large HTTP downloads or BT downloads (not counting broken memory), so I don't know. BT divides the download in chunks and creates the SHA1 hash of each of those pieces, so even if part of the download is broken, you know which one and thus only have to redownload the broken part.
Bryan