To get the most of BitTorrents

They can be found somewhere around you, the super downloaders. That guy at work who downloads GB’s worth of data for you without hesitation, that dude in college who seems to have all the latest stuff right after it’s released, how do they do it?

File sharing, torrents, P2P, they’ll throw the jargon at you. And if, like me, you too were a tad jittery to ask the resident geeks just what on earth they are, here is the lowdown on the technology that supports a major chunk of internet traffic.

It all started with a user-to-user music sharing service called Napster which was soon banned for fear of piracy; but the way had been paved, the arrow-signs posted. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing brought netizens an overwhelming flow of content. Several services followed suit – eDonkey, Gnutella, Freenet and Kazaa, to name a few. But they were all basically one-to-one or one-to-many services. These were pushed to a corner in 2001 by a harmless-looking newcomer called BitTorrent.

BitTorrent works by chopping a file into tiny chunks. Users can download all the chunks that are available and share those they already have. The process distributes the load among the peers and allows for amazing efficiency and download speed. In fact, it was so successful that several publishers chose it as their preferred method of product distribution. And now, we are looking at free streaming media using BitTorrents. It has come a long way.

Cutting to the chase, a seeder shares a file, many others (called peers) download and begin sharing while they are at it. You find the torrent listed in a tracker website, download the description file (the .torrent file), run it, have your torrent client join the swarm and download from all of them, while sharing what you download simultaneously. Very soon Zap! Your download is done. But since you’re a fair person you still keep sharing it awhile (give and ye shall receive!) before disconnecting from the swarm. That’s that.

Here’s what you need to get started on becoming the next big leech, er, super downloader.

Torrent clients:

•    µTorrent
•    BitLord
•    The Original BitTorrent client

Or take your pick

Torrent search sites:

•    Torrentz (they track torrents from multiple sites)
•    Mininova  (Famous for media releases)
•    Piratebay (The name speaks for itself, caveat emptor)
•    Demonoid (perhaps the largest tracker, but searches are limited for unregistered users)

Downloading procedure for dummies:

•    eHow
•    wikiHow

The things that they don’t tell you in books:

When searching for a good torrent, check if the releaser has positive comments on its page. Many torrents often have malware or are of bad quality; they are bound to have negative comments pointing this out.

A good torrent swarm has a minimum of two seeders and many peers; without that, high download speed is not ensured. So when you have options, choose the torrent with maximum seeds and peers.

All good torrent clients allow you to control upload/download speed. Since most of us prioritise downloads over uploads, set the maximum download speed to unlimited and maximum upload speed to about 1/10th of your connection speed. Remember, 256 Kbps means 32 KBps (Kilobits and Kilobytes), so you would cap your upload speed to about 3 KBps in that case.

With the said setting, try to seed a file for at least 10 times the time it took you to download. There is no compulsion to do this, but when nobody does it, a torrent can die! Also, they call you a dirty leech.

A download with a decent swarm can actually eat up all of your bandwidth, so when you want to surf the net while downloading torrents, cap your maximum download speed to roughly 2/3rd of your connection speed.

A torrent may contain a single file or a folder containing many files; you can set the priority for individual files. When you want to download a particular file first, set it to high priority. You can also skip the files that you don’t want.

The BitTorrent technology is perfectly safe and legal, but the content you download using it may be copyrighted – in fact, most of them are. So it’s important to know what you are downloading and how much security threat it poses to your system.

That’s about it; it’s time to use that content warehouse you’ve been sitting on all along (It’s called the internet). Get downloading and happy sharing!


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