Now that we have Local Peer Discovery we need a few options:
Stay Connected to Local Peers
Local Peers Ignore Connection Limit (Or Prefer Local Peers)
Local Peers Ignore Bandwidth Limits
I think that Local Peers Ignore Bandwidth Limits is the most practical but I can see usefulness in a myriad of local peer options. I'm just choosing the ones that keep the interface simple
Cheers, Ed
Last edited by Edified on Fri Oct 22, 2010 8:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It would also be nice to have a menu option to "Discover Local Peers" (as in schedule a local peer announce for now). Sometimes it seems like the normal discovery takes ages, even when only a single torrent is running.
Think of it as the local compliment to "Update Tracker".
If I remember correctly, when comparing peers, Transmission prefers LDP peers over those retrieved through other means. Information on where a peer is from can be retrieved by hovering over it; having a dedicated column or displaying over the encryption icon seems like overkill.
I've turned down requests to have separate bandwidth controls for LDP peers in the past, but there have been a handful of requests for it now...
I think the justification for separate bandwidth controls is pretty simple and strong. If there were no problems with ISPs and no problems with saturating uplinks we would all run our clients without bandwidth controls at all, contributing as much to the swarm as possible. On the local network the saturation point is often several orders of magnitude higher than the uplink (unless you're on google bandwidth at Stanford). It's fantastically inefficient to apply the same controls over both systems, especially are mostly discrete regarding bandwidth.
Overwhelmingly the user situation is such that uplink bandwidth is relatively low (single digit Mb/s) and local bandwidth is available in droves (100-1000 digit Mb/s). I cannot imagine that someone in this situation would ever want to apply rules intended to save their uplink to the local network. Same applies vice-versa.
At it's simplest I think a checkbox for local peers to ignore bandwidth limits (default checked) would be appropriate, efficient and desireable for most users. At it's most complex separate bandwidth controls entirely and local peer collaboration such client on the same lan put priority on different parts of a torrent so that no uplink bandwidth is used in duplicate effort.
For my part, the checkbox would suffice.
Appreciative of the amazing work on a very polished client,
Ed
I wanted to come on to request an add peer by hand option but after hearing the "Discover Local Peers" idea I realize that that would be very simple for a user.
The only problem I see with implementing that is that a scan of the entire intranet on every port would be needed. Maybe the programmers hear know more and could still pull that feature off.
What would be really cool is if there was a "Favorite Peer List". Maybe if the client used this feature there would be no need for an input dialog. One could just favorite a peer and for every torrent added from then on the client would check that peer routinely to see if it is a participant in the same torrent. That kind of feature could get abused though by people favorite-ing every peer they come across not knowing what the feature is for.
Or maybe the client could keep track of every local peer ever connected to it and automatically connect to it when useful. No user would know what transmission was doing to make itself work better and so the options would not confuse anybody. While at the same time, the needs of some users would be solved seamlessly which is even more preferable than giving us options.
Which ever way, it would be nice if there was some way to do it.
I'd like to chime in with support for Local Peers Ignore Bandwidth Limits, if nothing else.
With Transmission as it is now, transferring downloaded torrents from one Mac to another takes at least four switch flips—one to uncap downloads, another to uncap uploads, and two more again to set both machines back to their capped states.
However, since I don't know if I'll run into ack problems with the caps, I end up figuring that the best way is to uncap all downloads and uploads on both computers. This means I have to bother with eight surprisingly annoying extra menu navigations to raise and lower the speed limits.