Delft University of Technology Parallel and Distributed Systems Report Series A Measurement Study of the BitTorrent Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing System

P2P systems for sharing content have become very popular over the last few years. However, despite the increasing attention of both the research community and large numbers of users, the actual behavior of these systems over prolonged periods of time is still poorly understood. This paper presents a detailed measurement study over a period of eight months of BitTorrent/Suprnova, a P2P file-sharing system that is quickly gaining in popularity. In particular, we show measurement results of the popularity and the availability of BitTorrent, of its download performance, of the content lifetime, and of the structure of the community responsible for verifying uploaded content. We also propose improvements to BitTorrent to increase its availability and performance.