BitTorrent and DHT: Client Mutual Compatibility

When reading comments to the blogging “ Integrating browsers into an unsinkable tracker ”, I was most struck by the news that the torrent distributed table of hashes (called DHT) is not common for all torrent clients to have a distributed database of knowledge about files (like, for example, Kad for eMule ), and separate for some types of clients, that is, the developers of bittorrentovy clients have managed to arrange mutually incompatible DHT.

Back in May, I went to discuss this in Fidonet (in my e-conference Ru.Internet), and received the following answer from Konstantin Kuzov (2: 5019 / 40.1):

- It is time to get used to the fact that in Habré broadcast the same number of nonsense as elsewhere . DHT is compatible with all torrent clients, it has a spec.
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- The only client that is “incompatible” with it is azureus (vuze), into which DHT was screwed when that spec was not already in the project, therefore azureus has its own DHT implementation and, accordingly, its DHT network, but with the help of the mainline dht plugin it can use simultaneously and official DHT.

- Shl. Well and so, for a tick, DHT is a shit, this is a step back, back to those brake p2p networks, for which bittorrent was designed to replace. Only a bunch of extra traffic and almost zero benefit. It would be better if everything with the same ecstasy in all customers moved support for something like that .

- Even a pity that such features are mainly in handicrafts ala Blizzard Downloader.

(End of quote.)

But doubts do not leave me: I guess that users do not like to refuse the default settings, so they will not install the Mainline DHT plugin in Vuze. But Vuze takes a significant share of bittorrent file sharing.

I continue to sit on eMule.