BitTorrent is the protocol and the name of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen and written in Python and is released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0. The name "BitTorrent" refers to the distribution protocol, the original client application, and the .torrent file type.
With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments are distributed to the peers in a random order, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has. This scheme has proven particularly useful in trading large files such as videos and software source code. In conventional downloading, high demand leads to bottlenecks as demand surges for bandwidth from the host server. With BitTorrent, high demand can actually increase throughput as more bandwidth and additional “seeds†of the completed file become available to the group. Cohen claims that for very popular files, BitTorrent can support about a thousand times as many downloads as HTTP.
With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments are distributed to the peers in a random order, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has. This scheme has proven particularly useful in trading large files such as videos and software source code. In conventional downloading, high demand leads to bottlenecks as demand surges for bandwidth from the host server. With BitTorrent, high demand can actually increase throughput as more bandwidth and additional “seeds†of the completed file become available to the group. Cohen claims that for very popular files, BitTorrent can support about a thousand times as many downloads as HTTP.
