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.
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lol
I bet u people who “disliked” java are all non programmers ;)
Its good to know that ur opinions on that are rather ABSOLUT uninteresting :)
BitTyrant, based on Azureus, does something similar:
http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu
Java? No! Azureus? No!
Azureus, µtorrent? Transmission’s likely the most popular on the Mac. Open source like Azureus but Java free like µtorrent. Just saying: it ain’t all black and white!
The concept to this plugin is good. I used BitTyrant too for a while when I still ran Azureus. But seriously, *especially* with a modern system where you’re using your computer hard for your own stuff: you don’t want Java apps like Azureus (or NeoOffice etc.) hogging your RAM and CPU. Try shutting them down and see if you can feel the difference. It’s not just low enders whining about Azureus killing their machines, it’s also an objective entirely reasonable disagreement with Azureus’ philsophy as a cross platform Java app. There are definitely advantages to being a native program. Why else do we run things which aren’t Java?
Religious wars. Argh!
In open source Transmission I’m currently testing an autospeed implementation which isn’t part of the official project. Works very nicely. Open source never had to always mean Java.
Sounds a lot like the Bit-tyrant concept ..
Azureus/Java is not slow : My azureus
takes about 1 second to start ..
java + azureus + bullshit plugins? no thanks.
Peter: You’re wrong. This sounds NOTHING like BitTyrant. BitTyrant chooses peers based on bandwidth capacity and actual throughput, Ono chooses based on latency and network proximity (as I understand it). The latter is much preferred and will, in fact, improve the overall performance of the swarm in many regions. Maybe not in the US, where bandwidth generally sucks, but if you’re in Sweden this is a time to rejoice. :)
I used ono for about a day… until i realized it had 20 copies of ping.exe and 15 of tracert.exe open.
I highly recommend against using ono until it’s developed further. Slowed my pentium d 930 to a halt
[quote comment="171197"]I used ono for about a day… until i realized it had 20 copies of ping.exe and 15 of tracert.exe open.
I highly recommend against using ono until it’s developed further. Slowed my pentium d 930 to a halt[/quote]
Ahh.. No wounder why my computer is so slow now lol. But yeah, still works great though!! Getting speeds up to 100kb+ as before i only had 20 kbs
There is nothing wrong with Java! I am a java programmer and i find that only those who know so little about it complain about it. PEOPLE NEED TO GET THE FACTS!
Having something like Ono is better than having nothing. However, if one wants to find the fastest connections you have to connect and measure it. If you then go with the clients that respond fastest as well as with those which transfer a lot you will undoubtedly get the best result. Anything you do before you connect will therefore never give you a 100% guarantee. In some situations you will find yourself cut off from good seeds just because they are not near you. And what do you do with a feature like Ono when your neighbour runs a decoy farm? There is nothing that will prevent the possible worst cases from taking place. So Ono sounds good but needs close examination when put into practice.
BitTorrent is useful for transferring files globally around the world. Since clients can only handle so many concurrent peers and this plugin opts to only use local peers, won’t geographically distant peers speeds just get worse not better?
[quote comment="171832"]There is nothing wrong with Java! I am a java programmer and i find that only those who know so little about it complain about it. PEOPLE NEED TO GET THE FACTS![/quote]
One fact is that Azureus is horrifically slow on Windows compared to any other client. Another fact is that I can run rtorrent through ubuntu in vmware using less resources than Azureus takes up. Any other FACTS we PEOPLE might NEED TO GET?
This sounds misguided. Some peers will be slower than others but that should be overcome by increasing the number of peers until you saturate your link.
Any bias in the choice of peers is just going to make it harder for the networks that are being shunned to find peers and they’re the ones which will need the largest number of peers.
Oh, and Java fans have been saying “Java’s not slow any more” for nearly 10 years now. It’s really quite funny.
Of course anyone who has to use a java app like eclipse or azureus is not going to believe them. They’ll believe their own eyes.
All the JIT magic and advanced compilers might help on a numerical benchmark but once it comes to actually interfacing with the system you find the standard libraries impose all kinds of overhead before you can actually get anything done.
Nonetheless I use azureus, it’s dog slow on my dual-core 2Ghz machine which is pretty sad but what can you do?
im in england and we seem to have crap upload speeds over here i find most my speed comes from the yanks when im downloading so doesnt sound like that great of a plugin to me
azureus is good im downloading with 50-70kbs but i just want more speed
I was once a Azureus user. Comparing to other lightweight P2P clients, Azureus’ performance is definately disappointing. If you don’t believe me, try it yourselves. I am currently using BitTorrent Official V6 on 1M bandwith, I am getting 85kBs (680kbs) at peak, isn’t that fast? When I was using Azureus, I had only 7-10kBs. I doubt this Ono could speed it up that much.
85 Kb/s for a 1 Mbps connection is poor.
If you only got 7-10Kb/s while using Azureus it’s because you didn’t configure it correctly.
I am on a 20Mbps connection and regularly max out my connection at 2.5 MB/s
Azureus is horrible because of its popups which are (as a matter of fact!) impossible to turn off. Thats plain rude by the implementors.
Unfortunately I’m stuck with it because utorrent (which is really great) doesn’t work very well with wine. :-(
Any other client in the league of azureus and uTorrent I should try, which also works in linux?
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