BitTorrent Simulator: How and Why BitTorrent works

Written by Ernesto on September 17, 2006 

BitTorrent is a great protocol to distribute large files. One of it’s main advantages is that every downloader starts sharing right away, even without having a full copy of the file.

Other key features of BitTorrent are:

  • Rarest piece first: sending the rarest piece first to ensure its availability in the swarm
  • Tit-for-tat sharing: what you give is what you get

    • The BitTorrent simulator is a nice graphical representation of how and why BitTorrent works.

    BitTorrent simulator

    via p2pblog

    Previously: BitTorrent Movie Download Chart (wk37)

    Next: BitTorrent: The “one third of all Internet traffic” Myth

    6 Responses

    1 Sep 17, 2006 at 15:19 by Yatti

    Gotta Love Bit Torrent..

    2 Sep 17, 2006 at 16:21 by Snapphane

    Nice simulation, but it doesn’t work as it should. I tried adding and then removing seeds/peers and the result was 0 traffic. For starters it looked really good, but when you have a swarm where non shares or everyone shares, except with 4 lonely peers in the corner, it is bad ;)

    But with a simple swarm (before adding and removing like crazy) it gives a great why of bittorrent traffic. Will probably use this to educate my friends :D

    3 Sep 17, 2006 at 21:23 by Ken

    this would make an excellent screensaver

    4 Sep 18, 2006 at 00:44 by dallas

    Excellent video. It really does help to explain this quite cleanly.

    You could change the ‘balls in space’ visual with a skeleton map of the world (mercator projection) with transparent tubes connecting the actors. then expand the keystrokes to add high or low bandwidth users or randomly dropout the seeds.

    da!!as

    5 Nov 06, 2006 at 19:36 by Apple

    Nice but there is not the option of removeing a seed. Just for learning purposes etc

    thanks

    6 Mar 18, 2007 at 21:44 by Anynomous

    the site doesnt work anymore

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