Performance assessment of libswift

Abstract

A performance comparison has been done between libswift and other P2P clients to assess whether libswift can be made the fastest P2P client currently available. A modular testing framework targeted at testing and measuring P2P clients has been developed and has been succesfully used to run several experiments with the clients and to debug and improve libswift. The results mainly compare libswift and libtorrent; uTorrent has been found unreliable under Linux and HTTPS was only used as a baseline measurement. libswift has also been compared to itself with different block sizes. Compared to libtorrent libswift performs quite well, but still suffers from two deficiencies: degrading download performance when many peers try and download the same swarm and large memory usage when confronted with very large files. libswift usually uses far fewer resources than libtorrent, though, while giving similar performance. Especially for use on mobile and other constrained devices or for joining large amounts of swarms libswift seems to be a good choice already. During the assessment several problems in libswift were identified and resolved. In particular a hard limit on the number of files libswift could handle was removed. Making libswift the fastest P2P client can certainly be done in the near future: only two deficiencies remain and libswift already shows several strong points.