About torrents and twister 0.9.18

Debugging the messages (posts) propagation issues during the last few days is being a great learning experience and insightful about the best twister strategies.

twister basically has the problem of distributing torrents (where user’s posts are stored) among peers in a way that is both fair and secure. fair: each user will contribute their small share of processing and storage (keep your twister client running!). secure: prevent denial-of-services as using too much resources.

libtorrent introduces a nice concept for this purpose called “auto managed torrents” (*). Auto managed torrent have limits on the number of simultaneous active torrents, thus keeping resource usage limited, and may decide when to pause/resume each torrent.

Unfortunately twister was not rotating torrents to alternate between active and paused ones. Last torrents to be added where kept queued during the entire execution time of twisterd. Thanks @stark and @kseistrup for the help with debugging which lead to understanding this.

I don’t need to explain that this twister bug caused it to be secure but not fair. So I’ve just committed the code to rotate torrents in queue.

A lot of posts should start to properly propagate now. Welcome to twister-core 0.9.18.

Please download and update (git pull && make).

thanks and have fun.

* btw: libtorrent’s author – Arvid Norberg – deserves a lot of twister credit as it wouldn’t be possible to develop this project in such short time without libtorrent.

Posted in Uncategorized
2 comments on “About torrents and twister 0.9.18
  1. Luis Soeiro says:

    Mr Freitas

    Thanks for your precious work. Some colleagues and I were trying to find some kind of secure and decentralized “social network” to replace the current centralized ones when we’ve found twister. It’s great.

    However, I’m wondering if it’s possible to expand it a bit. First, if it is possible t increase the current post limit of 140 chars (make it huge or unlimited). Second, if it would be possible to post other media files, such as images, videos and other files. Third, maybe we could use groups to simulate Google’s circles, Facebook’s groups and so on.

    Regars, Luis

  2. Luis Soeiro says:

    I forgot to mention that we would like to help out. ;-)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>