Bit Torrent, etc

[seldear]

I'm reminded of why I opted out of Bit Torrent the first time. It's like being back on dial-up again...

Could someone technical explain to me exactly what the advantage of Bit Torrent is? Is it supposed to go faster than regular download? Or is it just the general feeling of well-being produced by being a Nice Citizen and Sharing Your Bandwidth?

Comments

[darkjudicator.livejournal.com]

The theory goes, if you're leeching from 20 people who all have limited bandwidth their bandwidth doesn't matter, yours is the only limiting factor.

This theory only works, however, if you have a really fast really stable connection and you're trying to download something REALLY popular (the number of seeds has a HUGE influence on the effective transfer rate). For something obscure or not well distributed you're better off with an old-style P2P network like WinMX.

[ship-recs.livejournal.com]

I'm on a 1.5MB ADSL plan, and the highest speed I've ever gotten on Bit Torrent was 120kb/s. Normally, it's only about 30kb/s.

It all depends on how popular the file is. You might also have to open ports 6881 to 6889 on your router to get maximum download speeds.