Most of us have heard of BitTorrent, the highly scalable peer-to-peer file sharing technology designed to reduce the bandwidth strain on content distributors. With BitTorrent, the challenge is not in finding content to download, but in installing BitTorrent on your computer and finding a good, user-friendly client to manage them. We took a look at BitTorrent itself and the excellent Azureus client, and can offer you some tips on how to install them on your system.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file and bandwidth sharing network. While most people are familiar with the idea of P2P file sharing — making files on your own PC available to others on the Internet — the concept of bandwidth sharing is a relatively new one. BitTorrent enables small Web and file servers to host very large or very popular files for download without bringing down their machines under the load of multiple incoming connections, and without completely consuming expensive bandwidth.

When you download a BitTorrent file (called a “torrent”), you may not get it all from the server that you got the hyperlink from. Instead, you will begin to download pieces of that file from a variety of BitTorrent servers that have that file and are near you. By running BitTorrent, you also turn your machine into a BitTorrent server. This means that you will automatically upload pieces of the file that you have downloaded while continuing to retrieve the rest of the file from the other servers. So everyone eventually gets the file while drastically reducing the load on the main server, supplementing its bandwidth with the others that share the file. BitTorrent clients are democratic, giving download preference to the servers that have the most bandwidth and the most pieces of the file. Overall, the desired effect is for all users to get the file more quickly and reliably than they would otherwise have been able to.

BitTorrent comprises both a piece of client/server software and a protocol. There are several popular BitTorrent clients that supplement the existing BitTorrent software by adding enhanced GUIs, download managers, and other features.

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