Tuesday, December 30, 2008
BitTorrent: Blessing or Disaster?
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol which was developed by Bram Cohen in the year 2001. It was first became popular when fans of Japanese Anime started using the protocol to share the anime in the year 2003. It then grows when people are started to share movies, tv series (Smallville, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, etc) and even applications and games. Some people said that you may find everything in torrent even a copy of a magazine.
So, if it so useful, why BitTorrent becomes a concern? Well this is a very tricky question. It becomes a concern not to the BitTorrent users, but to the surrounding community. We are not talking about moral issues here, but more on technical issues.
Before we go further, let us learn how BitTorrent works …
Simple animation below roughly summarizes how does BitTorrent protocol works. The system on the bottom of the picture is the source or call ’seed’. The act of sharing from the full source is called ’seeding’. When the computer start seeding, the computers which are downloading from the seed are called leeches. If you notice from the animation below, when a leech has downloaded a portion of the file from the seed, other leeches may get that portion from 2 sources which are the seed and the leech which already downloaded the portion of the file. The process continues until everybody downloaded the full file and become seeders.
Courtesy www.wikipedia.org
Thus, you might be asking, so what? What is the problem? If you notice, the big problem here is everybody is downloading and uploading at the same time. In addition to that, the connection is not 1-to-1 or 1-to-many, but instead it is many-to-many. Due to this massive networking occur simultaneously at the same time, it has taken lots of bandwidth which others would suffer.
In an isolated scenario, take an example of a house with single source of broadband internet. The internet is shared to 4 people through a router. Consider, 1 person turning on the BitTorrent to download a file. Due to this massive connectivity, the other 3 persons will suffer from internet disconnection from time to time. Imagine a water pipe which has 1 inlet and 4 outlets. If the first outlet size is much-much bigger than the other 3 outlets, they will be very less water or no water at all at the other 3 outlets. Similarly what happen here in the broadband pipeline.
Thus, the keyword here is to tolerate and understand the need of others. I would say that the usage of BitTorrent is not meant for end-users (which only know how to click download-open and don’t know or even bother where the file is saved to). BitTorrent users must at least understand the basic of broadband knowledge so that he can adjust the usage accordingly to tolerate with others.
There are BitTorrent software or called clients which can help you to time when exactly you want to ON or OFF the torrent. This software also allow you to limit the bandwidth used by the torrent. But, in my experience, limiting the torrent will not really help in terms of controlling the bandwidth. The best is still turn of the torrent software when you or your housemates want to use the internet.
Thus, I would recommend uTorrent since it is freeware and has built-in functions to schedule the download and also limit the bandwidth. For torrent search, I would recommend btjunkie since you can see others opinion on the file you are going to download. Remember, there are lots of viruses being spread using torrent all over the world because you never know what is inside the file until you’ve finished downloading (which might be already too late). So, the best way is to see what others say about the file before you start downloading.
Example of postive feedback for this torrent file at btjunkie
Again, remember the below key points:
- Be considerate when you use torrent, think of others not only yourself
- They are lots of virus spread in torrent, be extra careful when choosing the files
- Use torrent only when you desperately need that file and it could not be found in any website hosting
- Use torrent software that can help you to limit the bandwidth and set download schedule, again be considerate
In conclusion, torrent is a very useful technology if every each of us really understand and do not abuse the usage.
regards,
aerobrain
