What is a Torrent?
What is a Torrent?
You might be hearing it batted around on the web here and there, and even in other media like newspaper or TV: "Download the Torrent," "Seed a Torrent," "Visit our Torrent-tracker," and so on. So, just what is this latest tech gizmo and why is everybody talking about it?
Torrents are just a new way of downloading files. Don't worry, the old ways of downloading files over the Internet are not going away! (And since when does anything in tech go away for good?) But Torrents are considered an improvement. To explain this, we have to start at the BitTorrent protocol. And we'll try to keep it simple!
The technology we now refer to as "BitTorrent" was created to solve a problem. that problem is one we're all familiar with - the experience of visiting a site only to find that it's down because the server's too busy. In the case of downloading large files, the typical set-up is that someone puts the file for upload on their server, announces it as available, and then hundreds of users go to that server to download it at the same time.
So imagine if you were a waiter at a restaurant. Think how inefficient it would be if you had no customers 98% of the time, and then suddenly you had hundreds of customers all at once. Let's simplify this example further and say that all you had to do was take each customer's order, deliver it to the kitchen, and bring the food back from the kitchen to the customer. But you can't serve everyone at once!
Imagine, instead, if every customer who placed an order also became a waiter and took somebody else's order as well. You can see where all of the customers helping each other while they're being helped would be more practical than all of them waiting on one waiter! In fact, we could all make this a self-service kitchen - as long as there's enough food and space to cook it, an infinite number of customers can come in and get what they want without having to wait around.
This concept which we have introduced is called "peer-to-peer." Instead of a hierarchy, with many clients depending on one server, everyone is equal, so every client is a server and vice versa.
In BitTorrent, you receive a piece of the file from the original server, but also receive pieces from other downloaders at the same time. You also turn around and serve the pieces you're receiving to other clients looking for the download. Eventually, by passing all these pieces around, everybody has what they needed, but only a few clients had to depend on the server!
To participate, you will need two things: a BitTorrent program and a "seed." A "seed" is just a very small file with a packet of information which tells the program which file to go out and find, and a BitTorrent program is just specialized software that handles the peer-to-peer protocol.
In using BitTorrent, you will become very familiar with two terms: "seeding" and "leeching." Seeding is to provide the file for others to download, leeching is just to download it from a seeder. Think "waiters" and "diners" from our example. Of course, you are encouraged to seed as much as you leech. BitTorrent clients all have tight controls in place to ensure that you cannot leech without also seeding, and nice citizens help the system work by keeping the file open for seeding. The system is designed so that seeding a file for upload impacts neither your computer speed nor Internet download speed.
Filed Under: Education in Technology • The Internetz
