How Torrents Work

No matter how you look at it, torrents are one of the most effective ways to transfer large (and small) quanitites of data among any number of peers.

Instead of relying on powerful servers with enourmous bandwidth capable of handling thousands of users at the same time, bit torrent relies on each peer to contribute a small part of their own bandwidth to send pieces of data to other peers.

Ok... it might sound simple to some, but to a large number of people it still sounds "mysterious".

So, nothing better than seeing how it actually works in this processing visualization of how BitTorrent works.

[Click on the image to jump to the animation]

In the initial moments, you'll see that only the seeders (the people having the complete files) send data to the peers, but after a while... peers themselves will start sharing data - and that's why the original "servers/seeders" will have a lot less "work" to do.

[via Torrent Freak]