BitTorrent and DHT: Mutual Customer Compatibility

    When reading the comments on the blog post “ Combining Browsers into an Unsinkable Tracker ”, I was most struck by the news that the torrent distributed hash table (the so-called DHT) is not shared by all torrent clients with a distributed database of file knowledge (such as Kad for eMule ), and separate for some types of clients, that is, developers of bittorrent clients managed to arrange mutually incompatible DHTs.

    Back in May, I went to discuss it in FidoNet (in my ekhokonferentsii Ru.Internet), and received the following response from Konstantin Bodies (2: 5019 / 40.1):

    - It is time to get used to that Habré broadcast the same number of delusions as a and anywhereyet. DHT for all torrent clients is compatible, there is a spec for it .

    - The only client that is “incompatible” with it is azureus (vuze), into which DHT was screwed when that spec was not yet in the project, therefore azureus has its own DHT implementation and, accordingly, its own DHT network, but using the mainline dht plugin can use both its own and official DHT.

    - Threat. And so, for starters, DHT is shit, it’s a step back, back to those brake p2p networks for which bittorrent was developed. Only a bunch of excess traffic and almost zero benefit. It would be better if everyone with the same enthusiasm in all clients moved support for something like that .

    - It’s even a pity that such features are mainly in the crafts of Ala Blizzard Downloader.

    (End of quote.)

    But doubts do not leave me: I guess that users do not like to refuse the default settings, so they will not install the Mainline DHT plugin in Vuze. But Vuze occupies a significant share of bittorrent file sharing.

    I keep sitting on eMule.

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