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Sat, 30 Nov 2002
BitTorrent speeds downloads by using multiple servers
You have a great product, many customers, and are delivering your product to hordes of happy customers online. Serving large files creates problems of scaling, flash crowds, and reliability. As you grow, they become more central to your business, but your bandwidth costs go up as well. It's a vicious cycle.
BitTorrent is a simple software product which addresses all of these problems.
The key to cheap file distribution is to tap the unutilized upload capacity of your customers. It's free. Their contribution grows at the same rate as their demand, creating limitless scalability for a fixed cost.
The Mac OS X version of BitTorrent works with your web browser as a helper application. When you download a .torrent file, BitTorrent will use it to locate the actual file and download it from multiple servers. To insure that the file isn't corrupted and allow interrupted downloads to be resumed, BitTorrent does a SHA1 hash on all data and verifies the integrity of the completed download.
For more information, visit http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/index.html. The Mac OS X version can be downloaded here.
The open source project is also available from SourceForge.