Thursday, July 22, 2010

Torrenting terms

Seeds: How many people have the entire torrent and are online, able to connect to you and send you the files.


Seed: To upload a torrent (your client does this automatically when you download)


Client: The torrenting program you use (in this case, uTorrent).


Leechers: How many people don't have the entire torrent and are downloading it.  They can upload pieces to you when you don't have them.


Ratio: How much you've downloaded vs uploaded.  You generally want to upload to ~1.1; that is to say, you've uploaded 1.1x as much as you've downloaded.


Down Speed: How fast you're downloading a torrent.


Up Speed: How fast you're uploading a torrent.


ETA: Time left on a torrent's download.


Tracker: The site that is tracking the torrent.


Hash: (This generally only matters when you're close to finishing the download of a torrent and it keeps going back to, say, 98%, getting close to finishing, and so on) Information in files that lets the torrent client know that it's the right file.  If a download keeps hanging around a certain percent and goes past it, only to go back to that percent, you're experiencing a hash failure.  That is to say, someone's messed with the data in some way (sometimes by accident, shit happens, lol) and your client notices.