P2P in Detail - Torrents

As the title says, today I'll be digging a little deeper into the world of P2P. This post is mainly about how torrents work and how you can download them. In the world of P2P, torrents are the most dominant because of two main reasons:

1. Ease of finding torrents because of a large variety of sites that deal with different formats.

2. More uploaders, or seeders, means higher download speeds than P2P File Sharing clients.

How do torrents work?

I'll make this as straightforward as possible. Here is an example to understand this concept easier. Lets name our seeders S1, S2 and S3. Our leechers, or downloaders, will be named L1, L2 and L3. The creator of the torrent will be named C1.

C1 will submit a .torrent file, which contains information on the size, extension and parts of the file, to any popular torrent site. He then starts to seed this file so other people can leech it from him. Once they're done downloading the file, they can then optionally seed this file to make the download speed faster.

NOTE: (higher upload speed of seeders = higher download speed).

If they choose to seed this file, they'll be named S1, S2 and S3. A few people come over and find out that they need this file, so they download it. Hence, they become leechers. We'll name them L1, L2 and L3. These three leechers will download the file from the seeders. If one of the seeders switches off his connection or shuts down his computer, the download speed will decrease. If someone else decides to start seeding the file, the download speed will increase.

After all this happens hundreds and hundreds of times over, the file gets older and seeders stop seeding this file. When this happens, the torrent virtually dies. This means that there are no seeders left to upload the file. The only way to bring dead torrents back to life is by convincing people who already have the file to start seeding it again. There is also another way to bring torrents back to life, but I will explain how to do that later.

How do I start downloading torrents?

Easy.

1. Visit my post on my other blog here.

2. Go to anyone of the listed sites.

3. Search for the file you want.

4. Look at the seeds on the right, near the torrent name. The higher the seeds, the better.

5. Its best to have less leechers than seeders, but it doesn't really matter.

6. Download uTorrent from here.

7. Install the client.

8. Download the torrent file for the file you want to download.

9. Open the .torrent file with uTorrent.

10. There you go!

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