Okay, well, let me just take everything I said back...
(Image from:
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/images/torrent-figure2.png )
This is a traditional server. (The one in the middle)
A traditional server has one internet connection, and serves up the computers with the requested files through that one connection.
Cons of this:
Well, one is obvious: You can really overload a connection by doing that.
Say the server has a 100MBPS connection, and you have 400 people downloading one 1GB file off of the server. The server can only provide those 400 people with a 250KBPS connection speed.
One pro:
If you dont have an overloaded connection, you are 100% sure to be able to serve the file, no matter what.
Its like a waitress in a restaurant. How many customers are there? Can the waitress handle the amount of customers? Is it going to take longer for a waitress to serve 100 customers, as compared to 10? Of course it is.
(Image source:
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/images/torrent-figure1.png )
This is a picture of a torrent "network".
Whats going on here?
See the server? Its handling something completely different.
See the computers? They are giving information to other computers.
The server is holding a list of computers. Each of those computers has a part of the file you want.
Your computer queries the server for a list of all the computers that have parts of the file you want, and gets the other computers IP addresses in return. Your computer starts getting information from all those other computers, they are passing information to you.
Along with you getting information, your computer will start sending out parts of the file to other people. Its very community based.
(Source:
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/images/torrentbrokenup.gif )
If you could take a torrent file and the data you are getting, and lay it out flat, it would look kind of like this.
The lines on the top bar represent the amount of downloaded data. You are receiving different parts of the file from other computers. One computer might be sending one part, another another part..
It sounds complex, but, once you start using Torrents, it makes sense easily.
Caution:Check with your ISP before using torrents heavily.
Some ISP's consider torrents abuse, and will slow down your connection for using Torrents and other P2P like applications. If your ISP is like mine, you might be charged extra for going over a certain bandwidth each month. (Torrents can take up a lot of monthly data transfer, known as bandwidth.)
