Re: [Openpacket-devel] Just uploaded some torrents

[David J. B. <da...@vo...>]

Sharri Parsell wrote:
>> Sharri, what do you think about making the site more torrent-friendly?
> 
> sure thing. so in a nutshell, add a new category.

Yeah.  I'm not exactly sure what to call it, though.  Maybe just "other"
would be good.


> 
>>> For something slightly more difficult, it'd be kinda nice to embed the
>>> tracker stats for each torrent inside the OP interface.  For example,
>>> before you download the torrent, it could show you the current # of
>>> seeds and peers.  This is kind of standard on web sites that host torrents.
> 
> i need these points explained in more detail. we're talking about
> particular captures that are too large to say upload and store on OP
> but instead just host the .torrent files?

Exactly.  In fact, not only are they often too large to host, they're
often too large to download efficiently from a single site.  So people
use BitTorrent to download many pieces of the data from different sources
simultaneously.  Those different sources are actually just other BitTorrent
users, so as you're downloading pieces, you're also uploading them to
other downloaders, and you are what is known as a "peer".  Users who have a
complete copy of all the data in the torrent are known as "seeds".  By
having one or more seeds in the torrent, you guarantee that at least one
copy of each piece of data is available, which is another way of saying
that you're not wasting your time on a download which will never complete.

So BitTorrent speed depends upon the number of peers and seeds which are
participating in a given torrent, which is why it's useful to list those
up front.  No point downloading 15.999GB, only to find that the last piece
you need to complete the download is not available because there are no
seeds.

You can see this in action if you go to a bittorrent tracker like
ThePirateBay.org and search some torrents.  They'll show you the relevant
stats before you download the torrent, so you'll know what to expect.
JJ can probably help you get this info from the tracker somehow, as it's
his tracker.

	David