Ability to Dump Peers to a log

[texeon]

First post, so I hope this is worthy!

Anyway, you know how there is the option to add a peer to the list, and how when you resume downloading, that the trackers will need to resource all of the peers, how about, in the torrent properties screen, you can go to advanced tab and click "dump to peers to .bcpl (bitcomet peers list) file", which will be automatically reloaded when the torrent resumes.

When the download continues, bitcomet will search for these peers as they were last seen providing a seed, if they are not up however, they will be removed, and when this process is completed, the trackers will start doing their thing, updating and searching for newly available peers.

Why would this be useful: It will provide a list of peers that some or even most will be up, ready and are reliable sources/seeds/peers.

What you may think or say (all of which are possible?):

Trackers already do this

it may prove to large

it invades the privacy of a seeder

may cause problems for trackers when it has to compare between the list and online available seeds

may cause compatibility issues with peers that are now dead but were alive on the list

may interfere with the downloading process

may lengthen the times it takes to start the download

Those are guess work, but I hope this idea comes to light, and appears in the next update.

But either way, you provide the best torrent down-loader I've seen, and you do a bang-smash job and maintaining, upgrading and providing it with features. I love you for it!

Keep up the good work!

[The UnUsual Suspect]

I can't see how it would be more efficient if done this way. Your definitely going to have a list of inactive peers and going to be wasting time and connections attempting to reach them, when the time it usually takes to get an upto date list from the trackers and dht would be done far faster then you could manually load your outdated list.

I also kinda cringe of the idea of making it easy to harvest peer lists, but other clients do, and ip addresses in a swarm are far from anonymous, so there wouldn't be any security issues, but as far as improving downloading, Ithink it would have the opposite effect. Maybe if the tracker was offline it might help alittle, but over all it would be futile.

Thats my opinion, but I'm sure development will consider it.

[greywizard]

You didn't provide a clear benefit of the method you propose.

Trackers, DHT, and PEX don't really take long to contact and will ALWAYS provide fresher peer lists than the method you present.

Besides, the fact that the client will get any usable peers from that list, is kinda guesswork too.

What if you re-start your client after a day?

How about two or three days? Or a week?

How many valid peers do you think BitComet would get from the list then? You're right, close to zero.

The processor cycles and time wasted on doing this would really outweigh any little possible benefit.

In the light of the fact that trackers, DHT and PEX already provide this service much better and accurately, the thing you propose seems utterly redundant and yielding results of lower quality.

And last but not least, if only for BitComet avoiding becoming known in the BitTorrent world as the client which puts a handle to the axe of anti-P2P agencies that labor on harvesting IPs of copyright infringers, and I would still advise against this.

[kluelos]

Some peers will drop off of that list while the client is down. Some peers will be added, but won't appear on that list.

The current, updated list is exactly what you get from the tracker. That's it's job and what it's there for. This list will always be out of date compared to the tracker's list. Given that, I see no benefit from adding this feature.