Facebook and Twitter speed up the sending of data with BitTorrent

Nowadays, when many people have forgotten about its wonderful advantages and others have become part of the ill-intentioned discredit trend led by those who fight piracy, P2P technology gains predominance among leading companies worldwide. Facebook and Twitter are some of the companies that, using BitTorrent in particular, revived peer-to-peer in favor of their processes and achieved an increase of up to 750% in the file exchange speed between their servers.

Twitter’s engineers, led by Larry Gadea, are concentrated in Murder Project and have made huge time savings in data transfer rate between servers by means of torrent technology. According to Gadea, since they started using BitTorrent, exchange processes that used to take 40 minutes now take only “12 seconds”. This is a very important achievement, especially if we consider that in a company everything is measured according to its profitability.

But not only Twitter has revived P2P, which is known worldwide for the popularity that programs like µTorrent, Azureus, BitComet or BitTorrent itself achieved. Facebook also supports this business trend towards speeding up information exchange between servers. Systems engineer Tom Cook, the specialist spokesman of the company that has grown the most lately, stated that the company has been able to afford real problems with web servers since Facebook started using BitTorrent technology to transfer code to them.

Thanks to the new use given to this technology, which is far from that controversial use criticized by legislators and opponents of piracy, two giants have demystified any kind of campaign against torrents and BitTorrent technology, and have cleared the way for many more companies to choose this system. In addition, this may be a breath of fresh air that can make programs like µTorrent, Azureus, BitComet, BitTorrent, etc. be valued again, since they have lost popularity to new download managers such as JDownloader or VDownloader, among others.

Cooperative and commercial, P2P technology comes back to the competition, this time with the help of BitTorrent, and does battle with its main virtue: its ability to speed up the data transfer rate exponentially between servers (or PCs, in the case of using it at home) so as to save time and money, of course.

Download torrents on your PC

Among the most popular methods for downloading files from the Internet, we also have .torrents. The Bit Torrent protocol works when a file provider initially makes his/her file available to the network. This is called a seed and allows others, named peers, to connect and download the file. Some Bit Torrent clients have their own search engine to look for movies, CDs, games, applications and more, and some others do not, which means you´ll to have to look for them in torrent portals. There are lots of clients to choose from, making it very difficult for the average user to tell a difference among them, since some of them look exactly the same thus creating confusion among users. Here we take a look at some of the more popular ones. We introduce you to µTorrent, Azureus, BitComet and BitTorrent.

µTorrent

This is, without a doubt, one of the best BitTorrent clients that we came across on the web. High download speeds and low system resource consumption are combined in µTorrent, meaning that downloads finish as fast as possible without causing your PC to grind to a halt.

One of the more interesting features of this program is its ability to download individual files within a .torrent, along with its support for RSS channels, avoiding the need to search for download addresses.

The only downside to this program is the user interface. Although the various features of µTorrent are clearly shown, it has a pretty primitive appearance. The only con we find in µTorrent is the lack of a search box for torrents, therefore we have to have torrents on our own and it can be difficult to learn how to search if we are new to this type of clients.

Azureus

Azureus is an alternative with two important things to bear in mind. Firstly, it’s written in Java – which we’ll talk about below – and secondly, it’s clear designed to make the most of P2P systems to view videos, in particular film trailers.

Now, the fact that it has been developed to run on the modern Java platform is both good and bad. On the upside, this program has an extremely attractive interface, along with a wide variety of features and options. The only problem is that if you don’t have Java installed on your machine, the program won’t work.

When it comes to downloading, Azureus presents the user with a very handy set of features and useful statistical information: you can set the download and upload speeds, get varied information about each file and each .torrent file in use, and see the average number of peers available for each torrent.

BitComet

BitComet is a pretty “regular” BitTorrent client. It uses few system resources, achieves good speeds, supports multiple downloads, and has an effective, solid interface. It all adds up to a package which is not very different to what is offered by other programs of this type.

However, one really interesting thing about BitComet is its ability to make use of DHTs (Distributed Hash Tables), allowing it to find seeds without the need to connect to a tracker service and thus happily bypassing the protection measures put in place by private trackers which only allow access to registered users. The only downside is that some of these sites have started to simply block all BitComet users.

BitTorrent

This application started out as an open-source client, and this was always its biggest strength. However, it went proprietary with the release of version 6, when it started to base itself on µTorrent.

This really shows, since now it’s more or less a faithful copy of that other program, discussed above. The only difference is the inclusion of a “Get Stuff” menu, which provides access to various parts of the official BitTorrent web site – one for movies, others for TV, Music and Games – from which you can search for seeds.

As you can see, the variety of features on offer is pretty big, with the differences between the various programs being fairly well defined. You must bear in mind that some torrent clients are banned from some trackers, so in case your torrent file doesn’t seem to start –making sure there are seeds first- try another one.

Since µTorrent features a user-friendly interface, is lightweight and pretty straightforward, it´s the best torrent client for low and high-end systems. It may not present as many features as other clients, but it´s size together with its minimalistic interface definitely makes µTorrent a winner when it comes to downloading torrents.