Imagine a teacher sitting in the centre of a class room surrounded by pupils. Teacher has a 10 page text book and 10 pupils seated around in a circle. All the pupils want to take home a copy of the text book before the class finishes. This is just like a bit torrent SWARM. Teacher is known as a SEED because only Teacher has the full 10 page text book. The pupils in the class are called PEERS. All the pupils want the text book. Each pupil or PEER ask teacher for a page of the book. ALL TEN Peers can ask for the same page at the same time! If they do poor old teacher, or our SEED has to upload 10 times more data than required. This sadly can be typical bit torrent swarm IF THE PEERS DO NOT KNOW what they are doing, the Seed having to upload more than 100% of the book as the PEERS keep on requesting pages which other peers in the swarm have already downloaded from Teacher. But can get better, as Teacher?s 10 pupils can all talk to each other during class. I am a pupil and I have pages 1 and 9. My fellow pupils or peers each side of me have pages 2,3, 6 and 8. So I swap or share my pages 1 and 9 with them in return for pages 2,3 6 and 8. Soon all three Pupils or Peers have got pages 1, 2,3, 6 8 and 9. They can now go back and ask teacher for the missing pages 4, 5, 7 and 10. OR better still ask the remainder of the class (or Swarm) if any other pupils have the missing pages since the last time you asked. So what have you learned so far. Well you have to UPLOAD as well as download to get good torrent speeds. Poor old teacher has 10 peers to look after, but as a Peer you have only yourself to look out for. YOU CAN AFFORD to give your pages to the other students in the class in return for there pages which you do not have. Giving stuff out is UPLOADING get that right and fast download speeds are your reward!!! If you do not share because you have too many torrents running at the same time, YOU WILL NEVER GET good download speeds. Uploading in Bit Torrent is automatic and can NOT BE TURNED OFF. This is done by your torrent software and is called an UPLOAD SLOT. The number of upload slots you offer depends on your bandwidth size and a typical upload speed (you sending stuff OUT to others) will give you 3 to 5 slots. The greater your upload speed allocation the more upload slots you can set up. For example if you can upload at 4 megabits per second you can afford to set 10 upload slots. The minimum number of upload slots is set at two, so running too many torrents will over load your connection and you will run out of bandwidth to communicate to the other pupils or even teacher, the original seed. OVERLOADING your client KILLS download speeds. If you only have 1.5 mpbs (megabits per second) upload then best set that low at just 4 or 5. IF Poor old Teacher does not want to send out 10 times more pages of the book than is required by the pupils in the class this is done by switching on Super Seeding (Vuze) or Initial Seed (Micro Torrent) once you have a few pupils gathered around you. Then Teacher will only send 1 unique page to each pupil. So in our class of 10 each pupil or PEER gets only ONE PAGE from Teacher until between them all they have all 10 pages. Ah.. now you can see what is going on. The pupils or PEERS in the Classroom or SWARM now have to swap pages between them to get the whole book. Teacher has only had to upload 1 copy and the power of the SWARM does the rest. By Super Seeding or Initial Seed (Micro Torrent) you use the POWER OF THE SWARM to get your classic content out there FAST. So to be a good pupil or bit torrent user you have to speak to all the other peers in the swarm and UPLOAD your pages to them as you download pages not only from the original SEED but all the other PEERS in the Swarm. So what do I do now? Well first of all read up about your bit torrent client. Get to know what EVERY MENU and sub menu does. Measure your actual DOWNLOAD AND UPLOAD SPEEDS at http://www.speedtest.net and set your bit torrent client up corrrecly with those results. Remember that bits are a lot smaller than Bytes, so get to know what KB/s and Kbits mean. 1 mbps is roughly only 8 KB/s see the WIKI for more info on this. Never overload your client with more than one download and one seeding file at any one time. This is the most common mistake peers make. Some have more than 20 torrents active all at once. This is the quickest way to KILL your download speeds. Once you have given all 10 pages of Teacher?s book to your fellow students (This is called a 1 to 1 Seed ratio) LEAVE THE CLASS or Swarm. Take the torrent out of your list. You need your bandwidth for your own stuff. If your UPLOAD (stuff you send out) speed is say 1 megabit per second, NEVER upload at more than 0.75 megabits per second. Your bit torrent client has to chat to the other pupils in the class to see what pages they have and arrange a swap. It cannot do that if you have left NO UPLOAD bandwidth for this vital communications traffic. THIS IS THE 2nd greatest bit torrent download speed killer. NEVER MAX OUT your upload traffic. So education and knowledge is good torrent speeds, go get some today by going to your bit torrent clients support forums, chat rooms or Wiki pages and be the best uploader and fastest downloader in your area. Rigmar Radio ? Seeding to the World since 1992
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