What's so great about bittorrent?

[sesmi]

All i\'ve ever been able to get it to do is not work. Thats it. Why does everyone always go on about how great it is?

[LigH]

If you download a file from one (or a few possible) servers, you have to share its upload bandwidth with thousands of other downloaders. The more downloaders at the same time, the slower it will get.

With BitTorrent, you may download from hundreds of possible different sources. Especially for huge files, it is likely that you can collect lots of downstreams to you and gather a high speed this way.

Segmenting download managers are some technology in between. But you will need several known mirrors to gain speed. The BitTorrent network keeps track of downloaders which usually will upload at the same time they download from others. So with BitTorrent, you may have hundreds of \"mirrors\".

[tangerine]

The problem with PS bittorrent is that not many people seed the PS installation file after downloading. I seed it sometimes but I don\'t see any other seeds. Looks like that those who finish downloading stop sharing it very fast.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by tangerine
The problem with PS bittorrent is that not many people seed the PS installation file after downloading. I seed it sometimes but I don\'t see any other seeds. Looks like that those who finish downloading stop sharing it very fast.

The problem I have is that once a new installer is out, I obviously can\'t share it, because I update to the new version and don\'t have the new installer.
Also, I have seeded the installers I had (004 and 011) until they became obsolete. I\'ve uploaded about 10GB for the 011 one.
However, something that happened was that I was unable to connect to the tracker for entire days occasionally, especially in the end, where after a full week of \"Could not connect to tracker\" I finally gave up trying.
I don\'t know what caused that, because others were able to d/l (and therefore connect) just fine. Changing my external IP didn\'t help.