what can you tell me about bitTorrents?

Ive recently discovered bittorrent and it is a complete mystery to me. Its a p2p method as i understand it but it seems to be set up in a very different way than any other sharing system im familiar with.

any experts out there with enough free time to explain how (generally) it works? or even a link to a detailed explanation would help (i need this to be written in layman's terms, im a bit of an idiot when it comes to the intricacies of software design).


thnx

buff

 

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if you not already been there, hope it helps
http://www.bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/index.html

 

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, i have been to that site before tho. all i could gather from that is that it behaves like any other p2p but when ive tried bittorrent it seemed quite different - one has to go to web sites to locate files and the connection seems more stable and at higher speeds (on average) than the traditional p2p's ive used.

I was just curious what was different about bittorrent's design, why the neccessity to go to web sites to find files (as opposed to the simpler search method in most sharing systems)? Is it really more stable and faster or have i just been lucky?


just wondering

buff

 

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Bittorrent is only a sharing client, and not a search engine like Kazaa. The way it works is, somebody hosts a file using their web space, or cable modem, or whatever.

They draft up a small html script that contains all the info for the torrent.

They email/post/ICQ the torrent url to the people they want to share their file with.

Their friends click the url, and it activates the bittorrent plugin they've already installed in their browsers.

They connect to the torrenter's PC and each client begins downloading it. It's slow at first, since there are many downloaders and only one source.

The sharing feature starts working as the first clients finish downloading. They leave their torrent windows open, and begin acting as "seeds". Each seed is another source for downloaders to leech from, since a seeder also has the full torrented file.

Eventually, if nobody closes their torrents (you need to keep them open for it to work), you get a bunch of people uploading at collective speeds faster than a single webhost could offer. The more people you have seeding, the faster it is. So as a downloader later on, you might pull the torrent from 10-15 seeds at 200kb/s.

It's really cool when it works. The biggest trick is to get everybody to cooperate and leave their torrent windows open once they're done downloading and begin seeding. Otherwise the sharing ratio sucks. Usually a torrenting is coordinated in a forum thread where somebody posts the torrent url and a bunch of people start their clients up around the same time. Then as the torrent stays up and seeds accumulate, people keep posting/bumping the thread, and you get the torrented file shared to a lot of people.

 

hey, that was a simple and concise response, it gives me just enough info so that i can now understand (superficially at least) what i read about torrents.

Thanks a lot Stokes, that was exactly what i was looking for.

buff


BTW - if any other points that you (or anyone else reading this post) think may be helpful pop into your head, let me know.

 

it was too slow for my taste....

 

it can be slow but it seems incredibly stable (in my short experience anyway). Ive been able to download a couple gigantic files that, had i tried any other p2p method, would have taken me weeks of restarts because of dropped connections.