Bittorrent user anyone? How Apollo is transforming life for global BT users

By pjames, 4 January 2014 at 14:09

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Apollo is a monitoring system that taps into the Bittorrent (BT) ecosystem and efficiently and discreetly collects BT related performance data without requiring the cooperation of the end-users.

4 April 2014: Apollo is highly efficient and monitors speeds of millions of Bittorrent users spread over hundreds of thousands of BT users on thousands of ISPs. Here’s insight into what this system helps us understand.

Using Apollo, we collect (a) different traffic engineering policies, year long data capturing the download where BT users can experience more than 50% degradation of their performance across ISPs in the same country;

(b) we show that there exist significant differences in the end user perceived performance. It is not atypical to have over 100% improvement in the Download speed by switching ISPs in many countries;

(c) we show and quantify the effect of bugs and differences among BT clients. For instance, we show that there can be up to a 100% improvement between release candidates of a known BT client, and stable versions can be problematic, impacting the Download speeds for up to 20% for some ISPs;

(d) Finally, we show how Apollo’s measurement have out-of-the-box applications by showing how measurements can be used to boost the download speed of BT clients.