Seeds

When speaking about bit torrent, the idea of the Seeder, is that of a complete file. It can either be the originating torrent, or that of a peer who has completely downloaded the originating file. When there are more seeds available, the chances for downloading a complete file is greater.

When speaking about seeds, there are two different forms. The first type of seed, is that of a file that is completely downloaded and available on the peer-to-peer network. The second type of seed, is what is known as a super seeder.

With certain types of bit torrent clients, the option to be a super seeder, is a must if you have the original torrent file, or if there are no other seeds available in the peer-to-peer network.

In some cases, this is an initially known as an initial seeder. However, you can also use this option, if there are no other seeds available and you were not the original. This is also known as force seeding.

In the case of super seeding, the bit torrent protocol is modified slightly so that it does not violate the torrent regulations. By doing so, let the bit torrent client does, is instead of claiming to have all the pieces, the bit torrent client claims to have no pieces at all. What happens is that when a new peer connects to this seed, it is informed that it has a new piece that has not been sent to any other computers in the peer-to-peer network. When this happens, the network is unchoked, and the pure is allowed to download that particular piece of the file. The super seed, will then allow this to continue until it receives a confirmation from the other appears in the network, that any particular piece of the file has been uploaded a second time.

One of the major downfalls of utilizing this type of seed method, is that there’s not a liberal information available about the various file pieces that have been uploaded via the super seed. So what happens is that if too many seeds are set up to be super seeds, the speed in which any peer on the peer-to-peer network can retrieve the file, will be inhibited. This is even more so on a mature torrent, especially when more than 50% of seeds are Super Seeds.

Although the benefits of this method of seeding are not entirely clear, those who are paying by the byte for bandwidth usage will benefit the most.

One of the biggest positive effects, is that super seeding is a definite means of increasing the number of seeds available in the peer-to-peer network for any particular file. When speaking in general, the more seeds that are available in the peer-to-peer network of a particular file, the more leechers will become available and join the swarm.

But of course one of the major downfalls of the entire bit torrent network, is that of ISP spoofing. What happens is, the network is believed that there is a hangup somewhere in the network when there is actually none at all.

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