BitTorrent is sort of a workaround from the old P2P system that sent whole files that may or may not have been copyrighted and therefore fairly easy to track.
When you start a bit torrent feed, you are receiving pieces of the file you are downloading from multiple users. What this means, is that instead of download a file in full, you are only downloading little tiny pieces of the file at a time (torrents). Some pieces will download faster than others depending on your connection and the connection of your feed. This is why some files come in quickly, while others may not.
This is inherently the problem with the bit torrent system. Even though it may be quicker to use this method for downloading files, some torrents are much slower than others therefore inhibiting the download speed.
For the most part, and depending on the popularity of the file (i.e., the number of torrents you are receiving per file) it's usually pretty fast.
If you have a file that is sitting at 0 kbs, then it has fewer torrents to take from. It could easily start up today, tomorrow or next month, depending on when the torrent sources are available online. Usually if I don't get any download action in a week, I'll cancel the download and try a different file.
Coppermine wrote:BitTorrent is sort of a workaround from the old P2P system that sent whole files that may or may not have been copyrighted and therefore fairly easy to track.
When you start a bit torrent feed, you are receiving pieces of the file you are downloading from multiple users. What this means, is that instead of download a file in full, you are only downloading little tiny pieces of the file at a time (torrents). Some pieces will download faster than others depending on your connection and the connection of your feed. This is why some files come in quickly, while others may not.
This is inherently the problem with the bit torrent system. Even though it may be quicker to use this method for downloading files, some torrents are much slower than others therefore inhibiting the download speed.
For the most part, and depending on the popularity of the file (i.e., the number of torrents you are receiving per file) it's usually pretty fast.
If you have a file that is sitting at 0 kbs, then it has fewer torrents to take from. It could easily start up today, tomorrow or next month, depending on when the torrent sources are available online. Usually if I don't get any download action in a week, I'll cancel the download and try a different file.
Thanks..makes sense...i had like 1/2 of GTA San Andreas done in an hour then it just sat for 12 hours...
If you mean the programs themselves, not really. Azureus is probably the most reliable, but the torrents themselves are web-based files that are the same no matter what client you use.
If you mean the programs you are trying to download, they can be affected based on the amount of user torrents you are receiving.
Some people do tend to think that the client itself does affect your speeds, but in reality that is really not the case when it comes to the good clients. Some people say Azureus is a bit of a resource hog (ie. RAM usage) compared to say BitComet and most of the other main clients, but I have long used Azureus and it is a great client, however it does tend to use more resources than some of the others.
Any program that is sucking thousands, maybe millions, of bits of files from over the internet is going to use up some resources. Usually I run Azureus overnight but disable it when I'm working on the PC. This usually works out pretty well for me since other people tend to have the same idea.
At least it doesn't have spyware. That was the biggest problem with Kazaa, but was overcome by downloading the spyware-stripped Kazaa Lite. Sherman Networks, the company that ran Kazaa is still going through all kinds of legal battles. They thought that by locating their company in an "undisclosed off-shore location" they could avoid US copyright law infringement. Apparently they were wrong.
Bit torrent is the new medium because it's much harder to track pieces of files than full files themselves.
After the fall of Kazaa I used a client called Shareaza, which sort of combined bit torrent and kazaa... by downloading single files but as pieces rather than a whole. They came to an unfortunate end as well.
There's a huge resource of file sharing info over at http://www.zeropaid.com. That website can pretty much answer your questions about any file sharing service.
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by acsguitar » Mon Sep 12, 2005 11:07 am 
Why so slow? 
