With bit torrent files are broken up into a whole bunch of chuncks.
These chunks then have checksums run against them and put into a torrent
file. When you grab the torrent file your computer grabs chunks of the
file from everyone else that is downloading the file, not just the
server. It doesn't grab then from start to end like a normal download
it grabs them out of order and in parallel. Your computer can verify
that people are sending you unaltered chunks of the file by comparing
the checksums of the received chunks to the original checksums in the
torrent file. If they match, the chuck is kept, if they down, the chuck
is downloaded from someone else until it does match the original checksum.
Because of the way that everyone that is downloading the file is also
participating in uploading to other people downloading, Torrents really
shine when you have a rush on a particular file. In the old days, when
the latest version of a distro came out you might as well wait a while
before downloading it, because you were going to get less than a modem's
worth of speed... it could and would take days to download the ISO.
Then along came torrents and everyone could now download parts of the
ISO image from everyone else. With bittorrent in the picture this means
that the first day a distro comes out is now actually the best time to
download since there is a lot more total available bandwidth than later
on when it's not in such high demand.
Brian Cluff
On 01/25/2013 10:45 AM, Michael Havens wrote:
> how is downloading from a torrent better than just from a single location?
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list -
PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
(text/plain)