Torrent – The new way of sharing information.

K.Thirugnana Sambanthan M.Sc..,M.C.A.,M.B.A.,M.Phil. [Ph.D.],

Sankara Institute of Management Science., Coimbatore

Torrent is a small file with the suffix .torrent, which contains all the information needed to download a file the torrent was made for. That means it contains file names, their sizes, where to download from and so on. The program was written by Bram Cohen and carries an MIT license. This allows people to distribute files amongst the net without paying for massive amounts of bandwidth. Torrent is the most popular way of downloading large files, including movies and games. The Bit Torrent software makes it very simplistic for people to use. All we need to do is find a site, that contains the .torrent file. Web sites that have this .torrent file contain a tracker. The tracker then tracks who all is downloading that file and who all is uploading that file for easy distribution-management amongst other people. It will automatically find new sources to grab parts of the file while downloading. we can literally just set it and forget it.

Torrent principle

The BitTorrent protocol was made mainly for temporarily very popular files . The download speed increases proportionately to the number of users downloading the same file and that is the biggest advantage of torrents. When you are downloading something through torrent, you share your already downloaded part at the same time. When you start downloading, your application contacts a “tracker” server, which co-ordinates all clients. From the tracker the application finds out where to download from, which parts have the other users already downloaded and so on. Also your application informs the tracker about what part you were able to download until now – and by that it gives it at other users’ disposal.