Steam Clients to act as Servers

[Yatta]

I have heard that there is a possibility that Steam clients will also act as supplemental servers to distribute content through the Steam network. If this is true, I'll stop using Steam. Someone please confirm.

 

[Apos]

People have been begging them to ADD this (swarming content delivery), because it would prevent what's happening now: the content servers getting overloaded by big releases.

It's not in there yet though.

If it was tho, why would you stop using Steam? It'd would be like bitorrent: using spare upload bandwidth to save everyone, including you, the hassle of slow downloads. I can see if you have a byte limit of something, but I'm sure if they put it in they'd allow you not to participate in the uploads.

 

[Yatta]

I know I know... the reason why I don't like the idea is in fact the fact that it will be like Bit Torrent. For some reason, even if Bit Torrent is downloading 10KB and uploading 16KB, all my 160KB Downstream bandwidth gets sucked in and wasted for some reason. I expect the same to happen with Steam, as it as happened for WS FTP Pro also.

 

[Anubis]

I've seen something like this come up with my firewall. I denied access.

The problem is it uses up your bandwidth while your playing giving you a higher ping. It also could get your isp suspicious after a while (using way to much bandwidth).


Anubis

 

[n0luck]

maybe a way to regulate your dload proportional to ur upload... say u wanna disable uploading to other users...u get low priotirty dlaod speeds, but when u enable upload u get good priority ... like kazaa so to speak. this way one would be able to disable uploading for whenever he wants to play some

 

[Parasite]

If anything, I think there should be some options for "idle bandwidth" that lets you dedicate otherwise unused bandwidth to Steam(or distributed map compile tools)

 

[Nuclear_Gerber]

Originally posted by Yatta
I know I know... the reason why I don't like the idea is in fact the fact that it will be like Bit Torrent. For some reason, even if Bit Torrent is downloading 10KB and uploading 16KB, all my 160KB Downstream bandwidth gets sucked in and wasted for some reason. I expect the same to happen with Steam, as it as happened for WS FTP Pro also.

Thats the problem with uploading. It makes the downloads slow, and if you wanna play while you're uploading you get 4095 ping.

I think it's good if you could, lets say, tell Steam to upload in just half of your upload speed. That way it would still be relativly fast, and everything will stay smooth.