Torrent is a classic Peer To Peer protocol in which its clients share part of their upload bandwidth to facilitate the distribution of the files they download. It also has the following interesting features:
Its goal being only the distribution of content (in the most efficient way possible and limiting the bandwidth of the initial provider) and not the location of the latter, BitTorrent does not contain functionality to find a file, as in the other Peer To Classic peers protocols (Emule, Gnutella, Kazaa…).
Unlike many other Peer To Peer protocols, clients are not part of a global network (including all users of the protocol), but are grouped by file: each file, such as distributed torrent movies (peliculas torrent), will see its own group of users. Each of these groups will be organized around a central component, the Tracker, which serves as a kind of dynamic directory of clients interested in the distribution of a single file.
It treats large files as multiple fragments and each fragment can be downloaded from a different source. A single download can affect several files. When downloading there is no notion of files, but only a notion of pieces. Thus for downloading a set of files, it will be possible to have a piece containing the end of one file and the beginning of another.
It requires the distribution of .torrent files containing meta-information about the download.
It contains several mechanisms (which we will see later) to ensure its efficiency, including a mechanism that rewards clients for sending data to others.
Advantages
The main advantage and why Mejor Torrent is better is the speed of the protocol. In fact, among the Peer To Peer protocol community, it is the fastest for downloading large files.
For small files (less than 30 Mo) other protocols are more efficient (Kazaa, Gnutella) but beyond this size it becomes the most efficient. When there are many clients available, the download will be done with almost the maximum bandwidth.
Another benefit is the significant reduction in server load, which is what this protocol was designed for.
Disadvantages
The main criticism concerns the absence of a search function in the protocol. Unlike other Peer To Peer protocols, this absence is quite disabling as it forces the user to retrieve Torrent files.
For older files, the problem that will arise is that the tracker will no longer contain clients and therefore downloading will not be possible. With a search system, it would have been possible to retrieve the currently available clients for the data to be retrieved and therefore download them.
Another criticism of BitTorrent is that the use of a single tracker is an obstacle to smooth scaling. Although the bandwidth used by the tracker is limited, there comes a point where it is what limits the growth of the system.
On the other hand, one can also criticize the slow download speed at the beginning. In fact, it takes some time before it takes off. This is mainly due to the fact that downloading the first part of a file can take quite some time and during this time the client cannot (necessarily) load anything (hence the download speed is low).
One could also criticize the fact that the tracker does not do much besides serving as a directory for different clients interested in the same file and passively collecting data. It could, for example, try to decide more «intelligently» which clients to connect to each other.
Finally, we can criticize that the protocol does not provide for the operation of clients behind a Firewall or a NAT-like network (which is not the case with other protocols such as EMule, Gnutella, etc.). In fact, such clients have two disadvantages:
They have fewer possible peers because they cannot connect to other clients that also have blocked ports.
Nobody knows how to contact them, so the connections they will have are only those they have initiated.