BitTorrent field study
Arnaud Legout studied the “rarest first” and the “choking” agorithms in a real-life setting. In total 12 torrents with a different number and ratio of seeders and leechers were studied.
The performance of these two alogrithms was analyzed using the official BitTorrent client, verion 4.0.2. The “preliminary” results show that both algorithms do their job pretty good. The “choke” algorithm makes sure that every peer has a fair chance to be served. The “rarest first” algorithm on the other hand makes sure that the pieces of data are equally distributed.
Arnoud Legout further states that the last pieces problem is overstated whereas the first pieces problem is underestimated.
