Virtually every torrent client on the Internet operates in the same fashion, but Azureus Software is trying something a little different with the popular Vuze app. In the newest v5.6 build of Vuze, users have the option to merge two swarms sharing the same file in order to boost the overall speed of a download. Is the era of the unified swarm at hand?
Torrent clients come in all shapes and sizes — some offer loads of features and others are simply a UI for monitoring downloads. Vuze leans toward the former with support for RSS subscriptions, Web control, torrent search, video playback, and device conversion/sync. It tries to do it all, which not everyone is a fan of, but the new swarm merging feature might have you taking a second look at Vuze.
Let’s say you’re seeking a particular (public domain) video file, and you find a torrent for it. However, upon loading it into your torrent client, there are very few seeds and peers. The speed of BitTorrent downloads is entirely dependent on the size of the swarm, so even if someone out there has the file you want, they will probably only feed it to you a few kilobits per second. You need more connections, and that’s what swarm merging can do.
Swarm merging can detect when two or more of your active torrents share a file, then pool the seeds and peers to complete the download more quickly. You can find matching torrents on your own via the open Internet or using the built-in Vuze search engine. The overall makeup of the torrents can be different, but they need to share at least one file.
In the example provided by Azureus, a download of LibreOffice proceeds at 1.2MB/s. Using the search feature, you can discover a second swarm sharing a download of LibreOffice that includes the installer and a help package. This is a completely separate torrent, but Vuze can merge the swarms together to get that main installer file faster. In the example, swarm merging added an extra 1MB/s to the download.
The way Vuze goes about this is currently rather rudimentary. It looks at file sizes as a way to match files. This works well enough as there is very little chance two files in your torrent list would have the exact same number of bytes and not be duplicates. The program won’t use any file name matching to make swarm merging smarter, although it theoretically could. That bit of legwork is left up to the user instead.
It’s not a perfect system, but this is only the first release. Swarm merging could conceivablyrevive groups of dead and nearly dead torrents, connecting these digital diasporas so you can finish your download. All those live torrents with very similar file lists could also come together to make what’s already fast even faster.
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