Re: [Mldonkey-users] FAQ, Patches, Stalled-Forever Downloads, Slowness, Settings

[Pierre Etchemaite]

Le Sun, 29 Dec 2002 20:00:47 -0800, lenny bruce
<address@hidden> a écrit :

> and the "suggestions" pages I've seen seem to be written by people
> who have political views insisting we should upload more than we 
> download
> so I don't trust the advice because it seems to be skewed against the 
> user.

Well, you don't call it by name, but I guess you're talking about one of my
HOWTOs...

"In a closed network, sum(downloads) = sum(uploads)"

This is not just a good idea, this is THE LAW :)

Let's observe a connection between two peers:


   +---------+                                   +-------------+
   |         | bytes uploaded                    |             |
   | source  |---------------------------------->| destination |
   |         |                  bytes downloaded |             |
   +---------+                                   +-------------+

If bytes aren't lost between the two peers, you have, for that connection,

amount of bytes downloaded = amount of bytes uploaded

Now, if you look at the whole network, data is only exchanged thru
connections, so for the network you have:


      sum(bytes downloaded) = sum(bytes uploaded)


It looks like you're fighting against the physics (well, arithmetics)...

> are the P2P politics really weird here in this group too?
> go ahead and embarrass them... it's good for them to see how psycho 
> they are.

You're more annoying than embarrassing, I suggest that you moderate yourself
when you have to talk in public places.

> [...]
> I don't mind uploading but I'm doing a lot more uploading than 
> downloading.
> I thought the benefit of being able to download from so many people at 
> once
> was that each person didn't have to upload incredible amounts...

Then your logic was totally wrong, see above

> but apparently I'm the upload king of my area. Who knew I was so 
> generous?
> I'm getting nothing back!

We have a very hard time getting good download speeds since eMule peers are
more than 80% of network. The HOWTO was written before eMule became so
popular :(

> [...]
> I got patches from here
> http://concept.free.free.fr/mldonkey/patches-against-CVS2.02/
> 
> is this Pango's site? is this somebody else's patches? Who is Pango?

That's me

> Why do we need patches for something that's in CVS in the first place?

Why not ? I release experimental stuff that way, so that people can choose
to apply none/some/all of the patches. The changes that work well may
eventually get into the official CVS repository later.

Stephane Goulet wrote:
> I don't like either those suggestion pages, a straightforward, impartial
> eplanation of the settings and their results woud be very appreciated, and
> it would not be much more work for those wich make those "suggestions",
> just to admit they don't know the effect of some settings..

Personally, I did not suggest any tweak that I didn't experiment personally.
Otherwise, I wouldn't have written any background information about the way
network and clients work before each suggestion.

They're a few suggestions that I was not 100% confident about, and that's
written in the HOWTO. And for those I was absolutely not sure about, like
some TCP stack tweaking, I prefered not writing anything about them.

Writing "straightforward, impartial explanations of the settings" was an
alternative, that may even more durable than suggestions (sadly, 90% of
those suggestions are now "obsolete" with eMule), but it would have required
a much greater effort: there's no straightforward explanations because the
settings are not straightforward. I would have to explain all the
possible cases and interactions between settings, instead of suggesting some
sets of parameters that work. In the end, explaining how things really work
would be the same as explaining mldonkey sources (and more, if explaining
interactions with servers or others peers is also necessary) in plain
english. And since sources change, that too would require updating. 

I already spent several days writing the forementioned HOWTO, it's nice to
see my work recognized... *g*


most of your questions have already been answered correctly by others,

"random_order_download", "upload_power", "sources_per_chunk", "reward_power"
See
http://mldonkey.berlios.de/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=188
and some previous posts in that mailing list.
(reward_power only worked with the reward system, that did not make it into
the official client)

BR,
Pierre.