Site index
Every page on Piecewise, grouped the way the site is built.
Forty one pages listed below, in nine groups, out of forty three on the site: the two missing are the front page and this index. The groups are not chapters to be read in order: the mechanism pages go deepest and everything else bridges back to them, so a reader who arrives at one page from a search should always find the route to the mechanism underneath it in the first few paragraphs.
If you are not sure where to start, the short answer is that the four questions people arrive with are all answered from one place: what the swarm is, why a client says firewalled, what stalled means, and what a share ratio is. Everything else on this list explains one of those in more depth or puts it in context.
How a transfer works
The deepest part of the site, and the part everything else refers back to. Start at the pillar if you want the whole mechanism in order; go straight to a page if you have met one word and want only that.
- How a transfer works: How a BitTorrent transfer works, from magnet link to seeding
- The torrent file: What a torrent file is, and how to open one
- Magnet links: What the string actually says
- Trackers: What a torrent tracker does
- Finding peers without a tracker: DHT, peer exchange and local discovery
- Pieces and verification: Pieces, hashes and why the file arrives intact
The swarm
Who else is in the transfer, what the client calls them, and what the numbers beside them mean. The ratio page carries a calculator that does the division for you.
- The swarm: What the numbers in a client mean
- Seeding: What seeding means, and what happens when you stop
- Share ratio: The number, and what a good one looks like
Speed and connection
Why a transfer is slower than it should be, in the order worth checking. Most of the time the answer is the swarm rather than anything on your own machine, and the second commonest answer is that nothing can call in.
- Why a transfer is slow: Why a transfer is slow, in the order worth checking
- Ports, NAT and being firewalled: Firewalled, NAT and the listening port
- Stalled and stuck transfers: Stalled, stuck on metadata, and other transfers that will not start
The clients
The programs that speak the protocol, one page each, then the same questions answered for every platform they run on. The comparison page sets three of them side by side without naming a winner, because the honest answer depends on where you are running it.
- The clients: What they are and how they differ
- qBittorrent: What it is and where the official builds come from
- qBittorrent settings: The qBittorrent settings that actually change anything
- Transmission: The small client that runs anywhere
- Deluge: The client that is a service with a face on it
- The engines underneath: Libtorrent and the engines underneath the clients
- The clients compared: QBittorrent, Transmission and Deluge compared
- Clients on macOS: Torrent clients on macOS
- Clients on Windows: Torrent clients on Windows
- Clients on Linux: Torrent clients on Linux
- Clients on a phone: Torrent clients on Android and iOS
- Clients on a server: Running a client on a server, headless or in a container
Peer to peer
The shape of the network itself, and the other systems built the same way that have nothing to do with torrents: continuous sync between your own machines, the same idea inside a browser tab, and addressing a file by what it is rather than where it is.
- Peer to peer: What peer to peer means, and what still runs on it
- Syncthing: Continuous sync with no server in the middle
- Syncthing on a phone: Syncthing on Android and iOS
- WebTorrent: The same idea inside a browser tab
- IPFS: Addressing a file by what it is, not where it is
History
How the field got here, told as one technical argument rather than a list of names: each design removed the part of the one before it that could be switched off.
- How file sharing got here: The file sharing era, in order
- Napster: What it was, and what happened to it
- The lawsuits: The Napster lawsuits and what the courts decided
- eMule and eDonkey: EMule, eDonkey and the server era
What it carries
The ordinary traffic the protocol was built for and moves every day, and why a swarm suits it better than a server does.
- What it carries: What the protocol carries every day
- The Internet Archive: The Internet Archive and its torrents
- Linux images: Linux images by torrent, and why distributions prefer it
Is it safe
The risks that are real, the ones that are not, and what the law has actually turned on. Described only: nothing here is advice to any particular reader.
- Is it safe?: Is a torrent client safe to run?
- Encryption in a client: What encryption in a torrent client does and does not hide
- Is a torrent client legal?: Is a torrent client legal? The distinction the law draws
This site
What the reference is, what it refuses to do, and every word in the client window defined in one line each.
- Glossary: The vocabulary of a peer to peer transfer
- About this site: About Piecewise