What are Seeds and Peers in Torrents

File sharing is pretty much passed the ‘Limewire phase’ and has now shifted towards torrents. While file sharing services like Limewire was popular, torrents were still fairly new and many were hesitant to jump on the bandwagon because..well because they were retarded, first impressions on how to use torrents can be baffling to a Limewire user, however with the Gnutella network heavily hit by viruses and fake downloads, most p2p users had no choice but to shift towards torrents.

One of the first things that strikes a torrent user would be the seeds and peers attribute on a torrent file. If you’ve used torrents long enough you will realize that these numbers have a relation to the speed of the torrent.

Seeds are users that have downloaded the file completely on their local machine and are sharing the file. Peers are users who are in process of downloading the file and have a partial copy of the file in their machine. Peers can be sharing as well.

Based on the above definitions, the number of seeds is directly proportional to the speed of the torrent, a high number of peers can also contribute to speed if seeds are at a reasonably high level as well, a low seed count in comparison to the number of peers can result in slow download speeds. A quick look at these two numbers should give you an idea of what speed to expect from your torrent.

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2 Comments so far

James Moralde January 5, 2010 9:30 am

There, I finally got it. I’ve long wondered what these terms, seed and peer, mean. Looks like, as my contribution to the torrent world, I gotta keep seeding.
.-= James Moralde´s last blog ..Bugs Bunny Poster =-.

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Luqmaan reply on January 5th, 2010 8:52 pm:
Yep, but make sure you read my post on speeding up torrents as well as seeding at an unlimited speed can slow your downloads, thanks for visiting!

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