file sharing

Sharing Files With BitTorrent

distributed systems

Sharing Files With BitTorrent

Everybody loves BitTorrent. And rightfully so. With BitTorrent, you also start by placing your large file on a central server. But once the downloading begins, something magical happens: as clients download the file, they share whatever parts of the file they have with each other. Clients can opportunistically connect with

By Jeff Atwood ·
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distributed systems

Everybody Loves BitTorrent

The traditional method of distributing large files is to put them on a central server. Each client then downloads the file directly from the server. It’s a gratifyingly simple approach, but it doesn’t scale. For every download, the server consumes bandwidth equal to the size of the file.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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