Everything you wanted to know about Torrents!

Torrents have been an active part of the online community in the recent few years,the success of this particular service can be gauged by the fact that it amounts to 75% of the web data traffic. Torrents can be essentially described as an online file sharing service,which relies on a Peer-to-Peer network connectivity.This particular feature of torrents makes it stand apart from other file sharing services,since the availability of the file is not dependent on the up-loader, once it has been fully uploaded on the network,unlike other file transfer protocols,where the up-loader has the entire responsibility of ensuring the availability of the file.

In a BitTorrent P2P transfer,the file is divided into number of pieces which act as individual packets of data.All these pieces are typically downloaded non-sequentially and are rearranged into the correct order by the BitTorrent Client, which monitors which pieces it needs, and which pieces it has and can upload to other peers. Pieces are of the same size throughout a single download. Due to the nature of this approach, the download of any file can be halted at any time and be resumed at a later date, without the loss of previously downloaded information, which in turn makes BitTorrent particularly useful in the transfer of larger files.

A downloaded is initiated by a torrent file or a magnet link. A torrent file has a .torrent extension(also known as a torrent descriptor file) which once downloaded,should be opened with a BitTorrent client.It essentially contains the trackers of the file that is to be downloaded and the meta description of that file.While using a magnet link fetches the content of the file directly.

After a download begins in a BitTorrent client,pieces of file are downloaded on the basis of availaibilty and not necessary in the order in which they appear on the original file. The advantage of this particular feature is that as soon as a downloader gets the first piece it becomes a uploader of that piece and hence gets a position in the swarm of that file.

BitTorrent is the major sharing network online and is even used by major social networks for large data transfers.It is also official distributor of major Hollywood movies.

Major Torrent Search Engines :

• kickass.to

• piratebay.se

• torrentz.eu

Torrent terminology explained :

• Health

  Health is shown in a bar or in % usually next to the torrent’s name and size, on the site where the .torrent file is hosted. It shows if all pieces of the torrent are available to download (i.e. 50% means that only half of the torrent is available). Health does not indicate whether the torrent is free of viruses.

• Peer

  A peer is one instance of a BitTorrent client running on a computer on the Internet to which other clients connect and transfer data. Depending on context, “peer” can refer either to any client in the swarm or more specifically to a downloader, a client that has only parts of the file.
  

• Piece

  This refers to the torrented files being divided up into equal specific sized pieces (e.g. 64kB, 128kB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB or 4MB). The pieces are distributed in a random fashion among peers in order to optimize trading efficiency.
  

• Seed

  A seed refers to a machine possessing 100% of the data. This includes any peer possessing 100% of the data or a web seed. A downloader that obtains 100% of the data becomes a seed.
  Seeding refers to leaving a peer’s connection available for downloaders to download from. Normally, a peer should seed more data than download. However, whether to seed or not, or how much to seed, depends on the availability of downloaders and the choice of the peer at the seeding end.
  

• Share ratio

  A user’s share ratio for any individual torrent is a number determined by dividing the amount of data that user has uploaded by the amount of data they have downloaded. Final share ratios over 1.0 carry a positive connotation in the BitTorrent community, because they indicate that the user has sent more data to other users than they received. Likewise, share ratios under 1 have negative connotation.

Information Source :
Wikipedia.org
About.com

Article originally published on RandomHeads.com