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Acquisition does support swarming
Authored by: Porfiry on Jul 14, '02 03:28:19PM

The way it's done, at a low level, is using an HTTP Range request, which most gnutella clients support (since all gnutella file traffic is done via HTTP). When a file is found on multiple hosts, the entire file range is fragmented and each fragment assigned to a host. In this way, you can download the entire file in parallel from multiple hosts.

This is a pretty simple solution. But, given the importance of multi-source downloads for the network, there is a lot of work to improve this part of the network including a protocol for partial file sharing (so clients can share whatever parts of a file they have -- eg. sharing portions of a file you are currently downloading).



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