Glossary of BitTorrent terms
Open-knowledge reference entry
This is a glossary of jargon related to peer-to-peer file sharing via the BitTorrent protocol.
Terms
Availability
(Also known as distributed copies.) The availability of each piece in the torrent is defined as the number of peers who have a copy of that piece.
The availability of the entire torrent is defined as the nonnegative real number whose integer part is the minimum piece availability and whose fractional part is the fraction of pieces that have higher availability than the minimum piece availability.
Example: There are 10 pieces, Peer A has pieces 0 to 5, Peer B has 2 to 7, and Peer C has 4 to 9. Pieces 0, 1, 8, 9 have availability 1. Pieces 2, 3, 6, 7 have availability 2. Pieces 4 and 5 have availability 3. The entire torrent has availability 1.6 (1 + 6/10). The integer part is 1 because 1 is the lowest piece availability. The fractional part is 6/10 because more than one peer has pieces 2 to 7 (6 pieces) and there are 10 total pieces.
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