In the modern information age, when you won’t surprise anyone with the high speed of the Internet, downloading various kinds of multimedia information has become much easier than it was, say, several years ago. Fans of music, movies, games and other content must have met on the Internet so-called torrent trackers. However, if someone is asked to clearly answer the question “What is a torrent?”, Few can do it.
Distributors of content, in particular multimedia, at the beginning of the development of the Internet used file sharing services - servers, on which information was uploaded for subsequent download. By the way, file hosting services are used now, but due to the appearance of torrents they are in less and less demand. And there are
good reasons. The server owner usually limits the overall download speed in order to distribute a uniform load on the system. If you decide to download a heavy amount of information, for example, a DVD movie, then you have to download it from the file hosting service at the speed that the server allows. And since home Internet channels have high bandwidth, this download method becomes ineffective. In addition, trying to make money, file hosting owners make paid access to them, and a person who is looking for free information is not ready to pay for it (of course, there
are moral standards and the right code, but the article focuses on technology). All this puts a fat minus in favor of file sharing.
So what is a torrent? This is an abbreviation derived from the English word BitTorrent, or bitstream. Its essence boils down to the fact that the file or folder is now stored not on a specific file hosting server, but on users' computers, that is, the exchange takes place directly. If you try to imagine this system of connected computers, you get a kind of web.
That is, answering the question of what a torrent is, we can say that this is a huge service that allows Internet users to exchange files.
For example, you decide to download the game, for this you should first visit the game torrent, go through the registration, find the game and upload the torrent file. After that, this file can be opened through a special program Torent-client, specify the save path and start downloading it. At the same time, other users of the torrent tracker will also download this game from you. In such a simple way, content is exchanged.
In addition, in the network you can find the so-called torrent search engine, thanks to it the search for information on torrent trackers is facilitated.
You need to make a reservation, the download speed from the torrent tracker depends on the number of people standing on the distribution of the downloaded file. Typically, popular films, games or music have a sufficient number of users who are ready to distribute them, so there should not be problems with the download speed on the top torrent trackers.
We hope this article was able to fully and completely give an answer to the question “What is a torrent?”.