Although often considered to be synonymous with piracy, there are many legitimate use cases for torrenting. In addition to that, you can see five other elements in the root dictionary, including a 43 byte byte string named "announce" which is a URI to a primary tracker to use to announce yourself to the rest of the swarm, a list of 20 elements named "announce-list" which is alternative trackers to use (the file likely contains both the single tracker and a list of trackers for backwards compatibility for Bittorrent clients which predate the concept of announce-lists?) and some byte strings labeled "comment", "created by", and an integer named "creation date", which looks like a Unix timestamp.Torrenting is an incredibly fast and efficient way to distribute large files over the internet. Opening the torrent file in BEncode Editor, you can see the main info dictionary at the end of the main root dictionary, which is the part you don't want to touch since the info dictionary is what defines the identity of the torrent. When a Linux distro drops fifteen different spins of their release, their seedbox will tend to only seed a few of them at a time and you'll see completely dead torrents several hours if not days into the release cycle.Īs an example, I grabbed the torrent file for the eXoDOS v4 collection, which is a huge collection of 7000 DOS games with various builds of DOSBOX to make it all work on a modern system. Torrent availability might be poor at the beginning and end of a torrent's life cycle, since seedboxes tend to limit how many torrents they're actively seeding.Torrent files are often treated as second class citizens since they aren't as user-friendly as an HTTP link, and may only be generated as part of releases to quiet the "hippies" who still think that Bittorrent is relevant in the age of big gun CDNs.The torrent trackers are still a central point of failure for distribution, and now the content creator is having to deal with a ton of requests against a stateful database instead of just serving read-only files from a cluster of HTTP servers which can trivially scale horizontally.Maintaining Bittorrent seedbox infrastructure in addition to the existing HTTP infrastructure is additional administrative overhead for the content creators, which tends to not be leveraged as well as the HTTP infrastructure for several reasons, including Bittorrent's hesitancy to really scale up traffic, its far from optimal access patterns across storage, the plethora of abstract knobs which seem to have a large impact on the utilization of seedboxes, etc. Users tend to see slower downloads from the Bittorrent swarm than they do from single healthy HTTP servers, with a very wide deviation as a function of the countless knobs exposed to the user in Bittorrent clients.
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