Torrent question, ?.99 copies.

SeanW

Mods feel free to move if appropriate.

Whenever I'm in a torrent swarm, I notice that the number of distributed copies is always something.99 never a whole number, but with a figure in the very high 990s after the decimal point.

This does seem to have an effect with 99% complete downloads from weak swarms, and sometimes when I'm seeding a weak swarm I see it's gone blue, if I have the only complete copy sometimes the rest of the swarm will only have, you guessed it, between 0.990 and 0.999 distributed copies.

Why does that happen? How do torrent distributions always seem to end up with X.99 total copies and almost never anything else. It seems wierd.

Cuddlesworth

The original person who released the torrent, waited till the total amount of the file he was uploading was around 99%+ but never 100% and then dropped while laughing manically.

Its a really great way to piss a few thousand people off and waste loads of internet bandwidth. Files like that take at least 2 or 3 weeks to start to die.

SeanW

No, healthy swarms have it as well, instead of an even number or a seeminly random number of distributed copies, it will be something like 3.999 distributed copies or 5.993 or something. There's never an integer, and unless the torrent is dead, never anything under 980 after the decimal point.

Im using BitTornado btw.

zilog_jones

That sounds like miscalculations by your client. Just looking at some torrents here on uTorrent, and it's all pretty random numbers - 3.878 to 0.001 in my case.

I'd highly recommend uTorrent. I can't believe people are still using BitTornado with that chronic interface