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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

> fileservers don't send packets?

This line is far funnier than it should be. It reminds me of the time that I was told about how awful some architecture was because it would overload the network.

Their improved architecture sent lots of smaller files over NFS instead.

That was novel.

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Well, probably they meant network congestion. Network congestion depends on both time distribution and link distribution of data, which differs widely with the choice of network protocols and network topologies (even if total data flowing through network remains the same)

Yep. I'll admit, I didn't crunch the numbers but routing torrent traffic isn't cheap. I haven't found a definitive resources but AFAIK/IIRC torrent uses at least an order of magnitude more packets per second for the same throughput as HTTP.

> torrent uses at least an order of magnitude more packets per second for the same throughput as HTTP.

This is total nonsense. This would mean that instead of using 1200+ byte packets, bittorrent uses 120 byte packets to transfer data. This is easily disproven by looking at the implementation of any client or just by looking at the traffic and seeing that it uses 1200+ byte packets for sending chunks around.

That is definitely possible, but in my scenario the discussion wasn't that deep. It was more like the difference between NFS sending lots of small files and HTTP sending a tarball. The real differences were always going to be in the details of the implementation, not the choice of protocol.

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