Small Is Not Always Beautiful

TL;DR

This paper investigates how piece size affects performance in peer-to-peer content distribution systems like BitTorrent, revealing its critical role and exploring optimal sizes for different content types through real experiments.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental analysis of piece size impact on performance in BitTorrent, highlighting its importance and discussing design trade-offs.

Findings

Piece size significantly influences system parallelism and performance.

Optimal piece sizes vary for small versus large content.

BitTorrent's subpiece division addresses trade-offs related to piece size.

Abstract

Peer-to-peer content distribution systems have been enjoying great popularity, and are now gaining momentum as a means of disseminating video streams over the Internet. In many of these protocols, including the popular BitTorrent, content is split into mostly fixed-size pieces, allowing a client to download data from many peers simultaneously. This makes piece size potentially critical for performance. However, previous research efforts have largely overlooked this parameter, opting to focus on others instead. This paper presents the results of real experiments with varying piece sizes on a controlled BitTorrent testbed. We demonstrate that this parameter is indeed critical, as it determines the degree of parallelism in the system, and we investigate optimal piece sizes for distributing small and large content. We also pinpoint a related design trade-off, and explain how BitTorrent's choice of dividing pieces into subpieces attempts to address it.