| Today we hear a lot about torrents. But what are torrents? In accordance with the most popular determination torrents represent special files that are applied in peer-to-peer (or P2P as it's usually called) network environments. A peer-to-peer implies sharing files between PCs using specially designed programs. Bram Cohen has become the inventor of the first program for peer-to-peer communication. The software was called BitTorrent, and it's considered to be amidst the best torrent clients today. A great number of other P2P programs designed to use torrent files were created later.
Torrents downloading considerably differs from downloading ordinary files. To get a better notion of this difference you have to think over the procedure of files downloading from the server.
In case you're a computer user you must know that in order to download a file you should search for it in the World Wide Web and click a corresponding link to deliver the file to your computer. Let us illustrate what happens with the click of the link. The web page server where the file you're planning to download is presented begins the transfer of information to your computer in separate data packets. When reaching the PC of the client these data packets are reconstructed to form the file.
So the process is quite complicated. Small files can be easily downloaded this way, but when you have to transfer a big one you may face with such difficulties as low speed, disturbed communication between the server and your PC and so forth. These difficulties make the process of downloading onerous, and result in delays or sometimes corruption in the transfer.
Torrents in their turn represent a piece of information that is stored on a great number of computers, so when downloading torrents you receive various parts of the file at the same time. It provides a good downstream connection and goes on downloading even in case one of the seeds disconnects. A seed is a person who has already downloaded a file and stays in the network so that others have a possibility to download the requested file from his or her computer. Becoming a seed of numerous files is favorable because the more files you share the faster is the downloading speed.
In this way, using torrent files has a lot of advantages. Remember that you need to acquire a torrent client to download torrents. There's a great variety of torrent clients in the World Wide Web, so make your choice and go ahead. |
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