New.Adverts
bittorrent.main1.0
Client,tracker,spread
Bittorrent
Bittorrent (http://www.bittorrent.com) is one of the fastest growing peer to peer applications online. It is one of the most resourceful techniques as it requires the participation of all clients to spread the data rather than relying on one primary source.
bittorrent.overview
BitTorrent is one of the most interesting and imaginative p2p applications. In some respect it acts in a similar way to a virus, once the files begin to spread it is very difficult to break the chain. The easiest way to explain how bittorrent works is that each client shares with another in small pieces at a time. It distributes the file in lots of small segments, which eventually will make a whole.
If you think of a file as being a jigsaw puzzle, its made of hundreds of little pieces, however together they make the whole image. Imagine that you are trying to copy this jigsaw to ten other people. You could copy each piece and give it to person 1. Copy it all again and copy it to person 2 and so on ten times. This however is inefficient it is using all of your resource and you are repeating yourself 10 times. Why should the person being generous enough to distribute their file loose all their resources. So what would you do in this situation?
Lets save ourselves time. Lets copy one piece of the puzzle and give it to person 1. Let person 1 copy this piece and give it to the other 9 people. Now lets copy another piece and give it to person 2, its now his job to distribute that piece to the other 9 people. Eventually you will have given out enough pieces that not one person has the full file (except yourself) yet they have enough pieces if they work together to make a complete puzzle. Thus you have only copied the puzzle once, but its been distributed to 10 other people. Now that's efficient!
Now imagine one of the people decide they do not want to share their pieces of the puzzle. The puzzle would then be incomplete for each of the other people. This is the major downside of the algorithm. Each client relies on one another to share their files, if one person decides not to it can degrade the experience for other users. In most terms these people are called a "leech". They are taking for themselves with a lack of concern for other people.
With bittorrent's ability to spread large files quickly and efficiently it is highly sought after in open source distribution, especially linux distributions. It has opened a new generation of file sharing that has strolled from the general consensus of only one person sharing directly with another. It is now in some respect peers to peers rather than just peer to peer. I salute Bram Cohen the creator of the software for the genius approach that he has taken in the original python application.
- Those people at p2p.resourcep2p.Schedule
We aim to have this site up and running as soon as possible. The majority of guides we will roll out in july-Aug 2008. More content will be gradually added as time goes on. We will hope in the end this will be the #1 resource for p2p related information online.