Speed Up Your Torrents With Ono
Written by enigmax on September 21, 2007A plug-in developed by a university is promising improved BitTorrent transfers by selectively connecting to peers offering faster response times. Currently in use on over 25,000 Azureus installations, it identifies and connects to nearby peers in an attempt to accelerate downloads.
How to speed up transfers is a common question from many BitTorrent users looking to squeeze the last drop of performance from their torrent client. Here at TorrentFreak we like to give people as many tips as possible, such as those in some of our previous posts on how to Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed and Calculate Your Optimal BitTorrent Settings.
Developers at Northwestern University are also working to improve transfer speeds and have developed an Azureus plugin which claims to do just that - but how? From the site:
“The main goal of this plugin is simple — to improve download speeds for your BitTorrent client. For most P2P applications, the decision regarding which peer to download from is generally arbitrary. When most peers offer good download performance, the random solution works well. However, if most peers are in a different part of the world from you, your downloads can really suffer.
The Ono plugin avoids this by proactively finding peers that are close to you (in a networking sense). These peers generally offer better response time, which can lead to significantly improved performance. We identify those peers that are near you by reusing network measurements from content distribution networks (CDNs), i.e. without performing extensive path measurement or probing.”
According to the project, although the Azureus client is already involved in ‘network positioning’ for increasing transfer speeds, it fails to perform due to inaccurate network co-ordinates. They claim that only 10% of the co-ordinates are acceptable, while 60% had up to 100% errors.
As is the case with Azureus, Ono requires Java to run and can be downloaded here. Anyone wishing to read more about the project should visit their homepage.
Although low latency is preferable in any networking environment, it’s up for debate if in the real world, this in itself leads to faster transfers.
‘Ono’ is a Hawaiian word meaning ‘good to eat’ so we would be very interested to hear if TorrentFreak users find this plugin as tasty as the developers claim, so feel free to add your experiences to the comment section.
Previously: MediaDefender Anti-Piracy Tools Leaked
Next: PirateBay Fires a Broadside of Complaints to Police
57 Responses
Pages: [1] 2 3 » Show All
Azureus? No, thanks.
nice i’ll try it :)
Java? No, thanks.
Java AND Azureus? No, thanks.
great idea but azureus has bigger issues than that (like java)
Java sucks hard! Java is “interpreted” , bloated, not stable and slow.
Java is not interpreted since ages… it’s now jit compiled like the .NET Framework applications.
However I don’t think latency matters in bittorrent, the peer bandwidth is the important thing.
Mention Azureus and they whiners crawl out from under every rock on the interweb. Get a better PC and stop bitching.
As for Ono, the only ‘problem’ I found with it was the slight increase in CPU usage from the constant usage of ping and tracert. Not having any real problem with download speeds though I cant say wether it improves them or not, so the plugin may not be for everyone. Especialy if you dont really need it.
One of these days someone will animate a uTorrent vs Azureus Celebrity DeathMatch :D
f*uck download speed make my upload faster! down wit comcast!
I’m a happy uTorrent user, but I boggle at all the ignorant comments like “java is slow”.
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/java-is-slow-revisited/
http://devnulled.com/content/2007/02/correcting-logical-fallacies-why-java-is-not-slow/
Finding Azureus’ feature-set too rich for one’s taste is one thing. Dismissing a program merely because it is written in Java is nonsensical.
It’s funny because here in Spain, there’s an ISP called Ono, which actually limits your P2P bandwith :P
Until your precious uTorrent goes open source, you guys cant get these things. Us open sourcers can make useful plugins like these tough ;)
Not to mention, Azureus is a much better program than uTorrent if you have the resources.
This does seem like a good idea, I would of thought that isp’s will also like this concept as I presume it will save them a boatload of money in data transfer costs across different tiered networks, as well as reducing the strain on the internet as a whole, due to approx 40% of traffic being torrent related.
Hmmm…. keeps connecting to akamai. Should I be concerned?
and keeps connecting to limelightnetworks.com as llnwd.net. PeerGaudian is blocking the shit out of it. I’m unloading Ono, fuck that.
> Java sucks hard! Java is “interpreted”, bloated, not stable and slow.
a) java is just-in-time compiled
b) yes… java takes about 20-30 Memory baseline. But calling an fully featured app that consumes 80MB or so (Azureus) bloated is just biased… just compare with firefox or whatever
c) java is highly stable for me any many other users out there. If you experience something different that’s probably a local issue that can be solved
d) slow? heheh, that’s a funny one… in certain situations java can perform even faster than C because it’s way of just in time compilation allows it to perform optimizations at runtime which aren’t possible in statically compiled code
anyway, to the topic:
This plugin might have some merits, but it won’t miraculously improve your speeds. Since decreased latency doesn’t mean you get more throughput.
A note from the Ono developer: Ono will periodically connect to Akamai and Limelight for performing a DNS lookup (a very lightweight operation). Those are the CDNs mentioned in the article.
And many of you are correct in pointing out that latency is not always the most important factor. However, odds are that you will get better transfer rates from peers that are close to you rather than those across the world. Ono helps Azureus identify and connect to those nearby peers.
And yes, ISPs should like this. In fact, I hope to prove it’s in their best interest to give you higher transfer rates if generate “ISP-friendly” traffic with Ono.
what ive heard , they named it after Yoko ….
@Fred/Adam: I’m didn’t care for Java, but Azureus is a class act.
Not going to start a religious war. Don’t care what you run. Just letting you know.
If this plugin is guided purely by latency, it’s possible for it to kill your speed totally.
My ISP offers something like 480kb/s up.Each of my NL boxes can do 100mb/s. The other peers on my own ISP will obviously have lower latency, but selecting them over the seedboxes would be a pretty bad move for speed.
I imagine the situation in some south american or eastern european countries would be pretty bad, with very little bandwidth available in those countries but masses of bandwidth available just a few hops away.
Connecting to more low ping/low bandwidth peers also requires more memory and CPU use in the client than connecting to a few high ping/high bandwidth peers.
Another consideration is what happens when hundreds of low ping peers are receiving from a high ping super seed, with every peer using this plugin. The plugin cannot see the superseed as a seed, but it can see the high ping and thus drops it in favour of peers with no pieces.
The torrent would then become so inefficient as to be considered broken.
port it to utorrent please :D
[quote comment="170416"]@Fred/Adam: I’m didn’t care for Java, but Azureus is a class act.
Not going to start a religious war. Don’t care what you run. Just letting you know.[/quote]
Eh, i run bitcomet. The only problem i have is that it doesent report my downloading/seeding since i upgraded from 0.5 to the latest version. My ration has remained the same on demonoid for quite some time.
I thought it was a problem with my ISP (currently eastlink) however, i have tried multiple ISP’s as i move alot. I have made a short (yet sweet) article at http://www.itsoverninethousand.com/bad-torrent-isps-in-canada/ explaining the problems with certain Canadian ISP’s (one of which i work for sadly)
2 references to this post
Pages: [1] 2 3 » Show All
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.