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Originally Posted by Someone
I've heard of bittorrents, but have never looked into them or really even know what they are.  How do I fix that, i.e. where can I go to learn about it? Or better yet, how do I get that file?  |
Basically Bittorrent works by having a server host the people downloading the file, whereas everyone downloading it shares it with everyone else. One of these people, called a seeder, has it already downloaded, so he does nothing BUT share it.
To start this process you need a bittorrent client. The official one is at
http://www.bittorrent.com/, there are others, but the official is pretty good nowadays. Then you just need to download the .torrent file and feed it into the Bittorrent client.
The client will then download the file, while uploading the same file, amplifying the bandwidth a lot.
TAG right now has 54 seeds (people at 100% just uploading the file) and 35 people downloading it. Not counting the seeds, there are 2.992 copies of the file going around -- so even if everyone with 100% of the file blew up, the remaining people would get it. The remaining people downlaoding it have 22.7% done on average.
Basically what this means is if you start the download you'll get insane bandwidth until at least 22.7%, and even then, since there are so many seeds you will likely just cap out your connection until the file is done.