Torrent question

benjo · 12 Jul 2006 at 22:18

Hey all

I've never understood what is meant by the "ammount of seeds in a swarm" and the same with peers.

I'm looking at utorrent at the moment, and it says:

Seeds: 7 of 41 Connected (276 in Swarm)

What's the swarm?

Also, are seeds the ammount of people downloading and sharing the said file? Whats a peer?

Sorry for the newbish questions

I just never knew

sja360 · 12 Jul 2006 at 22:21

seed - a person sharing the complete file
peer/leech - a person sharing parts of the incomplete file that they have

as for the swarm i aint 100% sure but it must be the people available for it but you havent connected to them yet?

anotherF · 12 Jul 2006 at 22:21

this is always a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

Seeds have the full file, while peers only have segments of the file, peers may have different segments of the file!

Al Vallario · 12 Jul 2006 at 22:21

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Peer
A peer is another computer on the internet that is sharing the file you wish to download. Typically a peer does not have the complete file, if it did it would be called a seed. Peers are also called leeches, to distinguish them from those who have completed their download and continue to leave their BitTorrent Client running and act as a seed.

Seed
A computer that has a complete copy of the specific torrent you are downloading . Once your client finishes downloading, it will remain open until you click the Finish button. This is known as seeding. You can also start a BitTorrent Client with a complete file, and once BitTorrent has checked the file it will connect and seed the file to others. It is good to continue seeding a file after you have finished downloading, to help others finish. Also, when a new torrent is posted to a tracker, someone must seed it in order for it to be available to others. The tracker doesn't know anything of the actual contents of a file, so it's important to follow through and seed a file if you upload the torrent to a tracker.

Swarm
The group of users that are collectively connected for a particular file. Example, if you start a BitTorrent Client and it tells you that you're connected to 5 peers and 1 seeds, then the swarm consists of you and those 6 other people.

av.

benjo · 12 Jul 2006 at 22:28

Thanks guys, will give it a read