Torrents Terminology & Tips: A Quick Look

In my last post, I wrote about what Torrents are and how they were developed to what they are today. In this post I will cover everything you need to know to immediately start using torrents.

Since torrents run with the support of community of geeks, the interface is a bit difficult to understand. There are some terms which popped up by themselves which you should know to have a good understanding of torrents.

Terminology

Seeds

Those users who have the complete file and are sharing it for other users to download are termed as Seeds. Obviously there has to be at least one seed for the file to be successfully downloaded by others. A Seed is only uploading data and not downloading.

Peers

Unlike Seeds, those users connected to the server who have only partially downloaded the file are called Peers. Peers are also sharing (uploading) their part of the download but they need seeds or peers who have the remaining part of the download. Once the peer has finished downloading the file, it becomes a seed.

Upload-to-Download Ratio

It is the ratio of the amount of file uploaded to the amount of file downloaded from a server. It is recommended to have the ratio close to 1 i.e. upload as much as you download. Since it is a community you should share the file you have downloaded by seeding it. There are other advantages of sharing as indicated below.

Tracker

As I had told you in my previous post, their is a server which handles all the users downloading the file. This server is called Tracker. If it is down, then the download will fail. You need to connect to the tracker to start downloading. All this information is present in the torrent file.

Swarm

All the seeds and peers together are collectively called Swarm. It includes everybody that is connected to the server. The Average Swarm Speed is the approximate average of the speed of all the users who are downloading the torrent. Faster the average swarm speed, faster is the speed of download.

These are all the terms you must know before you begin downloading.

Tips for Torrent Downloading

A torrent must be in good health for you to be able to download it. The health of a torrent can be analyzed by the number of seeds and peers that are active for that torrent. More number means better health.The higher the number, the better will be the speed with which you would be able to download.
Torrents come and go. Popular torrents stay on but others might die. The community is huge enough to support most of the useful torrents out there.
Number of seeds also determine the speed with which you will be able to download the torrent. Preferably the number of seeders should be greater than the number of peers.
For fast torrent downloads, uploading is very important. The server will recognize a user with low upload-Download Ratio and will decrease your speed of downloading. Always set the upload speed according to your ISP’s specification and slightly lower than your download speed otherwise it will harm your downloads.

Great! Now I want to start downloading!

Easy! I know you are really excited to start downloading and I won’t delay it. So here is all that you will need to begin downloading.

Torrent Client

This is a software which will reside on your computer and do all the dirty work for you. I would suggest uTorrent or Azureus for starting out. The small torrent files (.torrent) are opened by these clients for downloading.

Torrent Resources

Internet is a huge resource for downloading torrent files. You can google for torrents to begin with or visit these sites which have lots of torrents for downloading.
Mininova
The Pirate Bay

So that’s it. Have a good time with torrents!