Torrent me, baby!
May. 26th, 2005 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneEver hear of Bit Torrent?
It's a peer-to-peer file sharing system, but it's not really intended for pirating music. Rather, it's a way to quickly download files, using the "many hands make light work" approach.
Very cool methodology. Let's say I make a small movie that I want anyone who's interested to see for free. I put it up on a site, publish the torrent file, and eventually someone downloads it using the Bit Torrent program. But while they are downloading it, their copy of the BT program has published a seed saying "I have a copy of this file!" So person #3 starts a torrent to download the program. His program sees that I have it and so does #2, and it simultaneously (more or less) starts downloading from both sources.
The net result is two-fold. First, #3 gets a higher download rate because his program is pulling the file from two sites. Second, my site doesn't get utterly clobbered in bandwidth charges because my file spreads amongst those who downloads it like a non-malicious virus. As long as your BT program is running, and as long as you allow it, the file continues to be shared with people simultaneously uploading and downloading it.
Pretty cool, neh?
Right now I'm downloading a copy of Open Office for Russet's Mac. I have had to do file translation for her, whenever the minister sent her a file for the service, it was in Microsoft Word, which Russ doesn't have. So she'd send it to me, I'd turn it into a text file, then send it back.
Theoretically Open Office will read and write Word files, so this would eliminate the problem. Of course, the current need is now over, but it will still come in handy for the future.
Well, to give you an example as to the efficiency of BT, I started downloading a 160MB file a little over two hours ago. I'm on a cable modem, which has a theoretical maximum download rate of around three megabits/second. The file would seem to be on a slow server and is coming down at 15kb/sec, it's now at about 66% or so of the download. I've been running BT downloading the file for about ten minutes now, basically since shortly after I started writing this post, it's at 97.7% and will finish in another 20 seconds or so, it's downloading at about 108kb/s. Apparently it's not a high demand file as I haven't uploaded any of it yet.
I used BT two or three months ago to download a DVD of music from the South By Southwest (SXSW) music festival, it contained something like 800 MP3s in two files, around 3-3.5gig of data. It took BT something like four days to download it because of demand, LOTS of people were downloading it and I cold see it sharing to others as it was downloading to me.
Pretty cool system.
Oh, and the conventional download was still at about 66%, the BT transfer has finished and it will keep itself available for downloads until I shut it down or for the next five hours.
It's a peer-to-peer file sharing system, but it's not really intended for pirating music. Rather, it's a way to quickly download files, using the "many hands make light work" approach.
Very cool methodology. Let's say I make a small movie that I want anyone who's interested to see for free. I put it up on a site, publish the torrent file, and eventually someone downloads it using the Bit Torrent program. But while they are downloading it, their copy of the BT program has published a seed saying "I have a copy of this file!" So person #3 starts a torrent to download the program. His program sees that I have it and so does #2, and it simultaneously (more or less) starts downloading from both sources.
The net result is two-fold. First, #3 gets a higher download rate because his program is pulling the file from two sites. Second, my site doesn't get utterly clobbered in bandwidth charges because my file spreads amongst those who downloads it like a non-malicious virus. As long as your BT program is running, and as long as you allow it, the file continues to be shared with people simultaneously uploading and downloading it.
Pretty cool, neh?
Right now I'm downloading a copy of Open Office for Russet's Mac. I have had to do file translation for her, whenever the minister sent her a file for the service, it was in Microsoft Word, which Russ doesn't have. So she'd send it to me, I'd turn it into a text file, then send it back.
Theoretically Open Office will read and write Word files, so this would eliminate the problem. Of course, the current need is now over, but it will still come in handy for the future.
Well, to give you an example as to the efficiency of BT, I started downloading a 160MB file a little over two hours ago. I'm on a cable modem, which has a theoretical maximum download rate of around three megabits/second. The file would seem to be on a slow server and is coming down at 15kb/sec, it's now at about 66% or so of the download. I've been running BT downloading the file for about ten minutes now, basically since shortly after I started writing this post, it's at 97.7% and will finish in another 20 seconds or so, it's downloading at about 108kb/s. Apparently it's not a high demand file as I haven't uploaded any of it yet.
I used BT two or three months ago to download a DVD of music from the South By Southwest (SXSW) music festival, it contained something like 800 MP3s in two files, around 3-3.5gig of data. It took BT something like four days to download it because of demand, LOTS of people were downloading it and I cold see it sharing to others as it was downloading to me.
Pretty cool system.
Oh, and the conventional download was still at about 66%, the BT transfer has finished and it will keep itself available for downloads until I shut it down or for the next five hours.
