Essentially the title. I was trying to download a file and my colleagues told me that I should use uTorrent. I did some research and figured that this was very popular a while ago, but since then has decreased in popularity. How does it work and why did it decrease in popularity?
In: Technology
It is an extremely fast way to distribute new (often big) data to many people/computers. It is well thought out and implemented and very efficient.
In a classic server, the more people want a file, the slower it become for everyone, because they have to share the servers capacity. It becomes the bottleneck.
In torrent, everybody downloading a file typically also contributes the already downloaded parts by uploading it to other users. This is rewarded by the algorithm, offering the highest download speed to the fastest uploaders.
In ideal scenarios, the origin of the data only has to uploaded the file *once*, often even split in parts to multiple people, and still soon everyone in the network will have the same file, without overwhelming any server.
In torrent, when you start a download, you are typically happy, when you see many people downloading a file, because it typically means the torrent is healthy and will offer high download speeds.
Also before on demand scaling existed in the cloud, it was a great way for people offering downloads to not be overwhelmed by surprising demand, because in torrent more demand also increases the supply.
Latest Answers