Distributing Large Data Sets

Even though BitTorrent is well-suited for distributing large amounts of data, very large torrents can still cause problems. Here are some of the problems you might encounter, as well as suggestions for how to avoid or ameliorate those issues.

Intermodal currently uses a single-threaded piece hashing algorithm. If you’re distributing a large data set and hashing time is a problem, please open an issue! I’m eager to improve hashing performance, but want to make sure I do it in such a way that real workloads benefit.

Background

In order to support incremental download and verification, as well as resumption of partial downloads, the contents of a torrent are broken into pieces.

The length of pieces varies is configurable, and the ideal choice of piece length depends on many factors, but values between 16KiB and 256KiB are common. Very large torrents may use much larger piece lengths, like 16MiB.

Each piece is hashed, and .torrent files, also referred to as metainfo, contain a list of those hashes.

For all the example commands, I’ll be using dir for the directory containing the data set you want to share.

Issues

.torrent file too large

When the amount of data is large, or the piece length is small, the number of pieces can make the .torrent file very big.

To avoid this, you can either break the data into multiple torrents, or make the piece length larger, so the .torrent file contains fewer pieces.

Breaking data into multiple torrents

imdl torrent create has a --glob option that can be used to control which files are included in a torrent. If your data set is divided into multiple files, ideally with a consistent naming scheme, this can be used to easily create multiple torrents with different subsets of the data.

The name of the created torrent is usually derived from the name of the input, so the output torrent name should be given manually to avoid conflicts:

$ imdl torrent create -i dir -o a.torrent --glob 'dir/0*'
$ imdl torrent create -i dir -o b.torrent --glob 'dir/1*'
$ imdl torrent create -i dir -o c.torrent --glob 'dir/2*'
# etc…

Making the piece length larger

imdl has an automatic piece length picker, which should choose a good piece length. You can see what choices it makes for different torrent sizes with:

$ imdl torrrent piece-length

Some torrent clients don’t do well with piece lengths over 16 MiB, so the piece length picker will never pick piece lengths over 16 MiB. This can be overridden by specifying --piece-length manually. --piece-length takes SI units, like KiB, MiB, and KiB:

$ imdl torrent create -i dir --piece-length 128mib

Too many files

Torrents containing a large number of separate files can cause performance issues. It’s not clear if these performance issues are due to BitTorrent client implementations, host OS file system issues, or both.

Distributing your data set as an ISO image

By distributing your data set as an ISO image, all the files in your torrent will be packed into a single .iso file. Additionally, recipients of the ISO won’t have to decompress the whole data set to browse or extract individual files.

You can create an ISO with genisoimage, which can be installed on Debian or Ubuntu with:

$ sudo apt install genisoimage

To create a compressed ISO containing your data set:

$ genisoimage                \
    -transparent-compression \ # compress data in the ISO
    -untranslated-filenames  \ # don't mangle filenames
    -verbose                 \ # verbose output
    -output data.iso         \ # output path
    -V DATA_SET_NAME         \ # volume name
    dir                      \ # input path

The same command, but with short flags:

$ genisoimage -zUvo data.iso -V DATA_SET_NAME dir

A torrent can then be created containing the ISO:

$ imdl torrent create --input data.iso

Users can mount and unmount the ISO on Linux:

$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt                   # create mount point
$ sudo mount --read-only data.iso /mnt # mount ISO
$ sudo umount /mnt                     # unmount when finished

Or MacOS:

$ hdiutil mount data.iso                 # mount ISO
# hdiutil unmount /Volumes/DATA_SET_NAME # unmount when finished

On Windows, MacOS, and some Linux desktop environments, ISOs can also be mounted by double-clicking the file.

Torrent Client Issues

Some torrent clients don’t do well with torrents with large piece sizes, many files, or a large amount of data.

Switch to a libtorrent-based client

If you’re experiencing issues downloading a large data set, switching torrent clients may help.

In my personal experience, torrent clients that use Arvid Norberg’s libtorrent have done well with large amounts of data.

libtorrent’s Wikipedia page has a list of torrent clients that use libtorrent.

Conclusion

If you have suggestions for this guide, please don’t hesitate to open an issue.

In particular, if you’ve found particular torrent clients to be good or bad at downloading large data sets, or have run into issues or found solutions not covered by this guide, I would love to know!