It’s been a long time since I wrote anything about Bittorrent, mainly because I rarely use BT these days, as there are far too many direct download sites out there offering the same content for half the bandwidth and none of the fear of getting busted. But still, there is the occasional thing I can only download via a Bittorrent client, so I thought I’d offer a bit of advice as to which torrent file you should download from a website.
You see, if you use a torrent search engine like Mininova, it’s possible to get multiple hits for the same thing. If you’re searching for the latest episode of True Blood, for example, you could get hits from multiple trackers. So which one do you choose?
At first glance, you might think that choosing the one with the largest swarm (total number of seeders and leechers) is the best call. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. What you want is the torrent with the highest ratio of seeders to leechers. Because there are fewer leechers in this swarm, the seeders have more bandwidth to offer in this scenario than they do in one where there are thousands of people in the swarm.
Read more about it at TorrentFreak.
La Roux is a British electropop synth duo consisting of writer and producer Ben Langmaid and singer and synth player Elly Jackson (daughter of Trudie Goodwin, the actress who played “Sergeant June Ackland” on the illustrious and long-running British police drama The Bill).