On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:52:38AM -0400, Joe Abley <jabley@ca.afilias.info> wrote a message of 41 lines which said:
The behaviour I have observed with BitTorrent is that clients are handed a relatively short list of potential peers by the tracker, and it's quite common for sensible, close, local peers not to be included. My assumption has been that the set of potential peers passed to the client is assembled randomly.
I did not check seriously so I cannot confirm or deny but do note that there are several proposals to improve "peer selection" behind random sorting or crude measurements with ping on a few hosts. A summary of existing work is on the ALTO Web site <http://alto.tilab.com/resources.html>. ALTO will have a BoF session at the next IETF in Dublin, so we may see one day a standard protocol for peer selection.