Why use Bittorrent?

[Icarus]

Why on earth do people use Bittorrent?

I downloaded it yesterday to get PlaneShift, and started to download PlaneShift as a torrent today.

2 KBps? ONE DAY left?

[sarcasm]Oh, good. It's up to 12 KBps. There's only 18 hours left. Much better[/sarcasm]

[shooraijin]

It *does* make it possible for people to spread large downloads among multiple computers and therefore make available larger files that would crush a single server.

OTOH, the protocol is still rather gamey as you've discovered, and it doesn't like my firewall (so I don't use it).

[Shao Feng-Li]

For me it starts out at like 123 hours left then in a few minutes it gets down to 3 and less. Bittorent is annoying but hey, if it got me the first ten episodes of Bleach, I won't complain- wouldn't do any good to do so anyway.

[Kaligraphic]

It starts slow because you haven't started downloading a lot. It speeds up as more peers start uploading to you. Once you have enough that you can start uploading for yourself, it gets a lot faster, because BitTorrent clients put priority on peers that upload to them. Personally, I find it to often be faster than direct (HTTP or FTP) download from busy servers. (I've maxed out my connection with BitTorrent and had to limit my download speed to keep other use possible. And I'm on 256/768 DSL. Of course, it can depend on the popularity of the torrent.)

The protocol has a bit more overhead than I might prefer, but it's still pretty good. Also, as Shooraijin said, it does spread the load around so that we don't crush servers with large/popular files.

[daveedo]

THis is the best means of distribution for newly released software. Usually, if something just came out it would be insanely slow to download it since everyone was trying to download the same file from one place. This way, new files are sent out to others as you are downloading it. There are some strange things about configuiring it with a firewall though which I never really fix (i am always yellow and not green), but still I can get some decent download speeds.

[enishi]

ah, Bit Torrent. giver of naruto, bleach and monster. i love thee.

[Kireihana]

ah, Bit Torrent. giver of naruto, bleach and monster. i love thee.

Yes, but Naruto no more

Anyway, I've got high-speed wireless internet and I'm lucky to get 20kb/s. Should I turn off my firewalls or something?

[Mithrandir]

I'm not sure I would advise the turning off of your firewalls. You *might* need to configure them to allow traffic that hits the propper port to tunnel through to a specific machine, but turning if off could render your computer without internet access (if it's hardware) or REALLY open to viruses (if it's software).