Torrenting is an excellent method of file distribution. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ll probably have heard of torrenting at least once — whether it be associated with legitimate releases (such as certain podcasts, indie movies, etc) or more shady usage (downloading music, games, movies, programs, etc), you’re bound to have at least thought of torrenting at least once.

photo credit: Viernest

I’m not a lawyer. Thus, I don’t counsel you on what to torrent — you’re an adult, so I leave that responsibility with you. What I am here to advise you on is how to torrent effectively and efficiently.

I apologize in advance if there’s no actual verb known as ‘torrent’-ing. If it really bothers you, just replace ‘torrenting’ with ‘downloading using a torrent client’.

How do Torrents Work?

Although this is a relevant question, I find it unnecessary to answer this. From my (very) minor understanding about Torrents, they are simply another method to share files peer-to-peer — meaning a piece of a file gets uploaded from one comptuer, transferred, and downloaded to another computer. The interesting part is that if there is a reasonable amount of uploaders (aka seeders) with excellent upload speeds, downloads will be beautifully quick.

I’m not sure I explained that correctly, but again, I don’t think that’s too important. If you insist, however, I suggest reading the following: http://lifehacker.com/285489/a-beginners-guide-to-bittorrent

Let it be known I take care of my followers. Now, to the juicy stuff.

How do I speed up my Torrents?

Firstly, you’ll need a good source — a Torrent with a good ratio of uploaders to downloaders (the greater the uploader-downloader ratio, the better; 80 uploaders and 10 downloaders will be better than 750 uploaders and 100 downloaders, from my experience). I like using Torrent aggregating websites (I prefer ScrapeTorrent.com) because they sort in order of greatest uploader count (not the same as ratio, but it’s usually good enough for me) and they sort trackers from all sorts of websites. I don’t even know what the hell a tracker is.

But, trackers are important. I’ve noticed that updating trackers speed up the torrent download consistently — so if you’re thinking download speeds can be improved, then right click your torrent and select update tracker (in some cases, this might be under Advanced — it’s not that advanced, really).

I’ll tell you something; a good torrent can hit download speeds of up to 700kb/s (again, this could be higher for some people — it all really depends on Internet download speed and whether or not your provider is throttling you — in this case, I suggest checking your client and I recommend Vuze, which notified me and performed the necessary adjustments). However, typically, torrents hit probably 75kb/s — which is respectable, I suppose. Simply leave your computer on for a night, and it’ll be done by the morning’s time (downloads are faster at night too, I figure maybe because people turn computers off — but wouldn’t this affect both uploaders and downloaders and thus cancel it out? Anyway, ignore that if it gets confusing).

Lastly, if for some reason you limited your download speed, remember to set it as “unlimited”. Haha.

Get your Engines Ready

I know that summer’s almost over, but it’s never too late to start torrenting. Whether you’re interested in new technology or distribution methods, torrenting is absolutely essential to explore and provide an interesting service — one definitely worth keeping an eye on.