This morning I woke up and it had happened, my all-time transfer ratio was 1.27. If you don’t understand BitTorrent, here’s how it works. When you want to download a file, you get a small torrent file. This file will help you connect to everyone else who’s downloading that file. Then you download a small piece from each of them so it goes really fast. At the same time, others are downloading small pieces from you. When I was downloading this file, I was downloading from up to 50 other people at the same time.
Now once you’ve downloaded the file, you can just shut off your client and screw everyone else. But the general rule of politeness is that you should at least wait until you’ve uploaded (given to others) until you transfer ratio is at least 1. This isn’t a problem because it doesn’t take much bandwidth or processor power so you just leave it going for a few days.
I had not totally trusted BitTorrent in the past, so had usually shut it off pretty early, but now I’m OK with it. I wanted to make up for all the times in the past I had shut if off early so that means getting my ratio to be greater than 1. And now it is. Notice that my transfer ratio for this one file is 7.36, meaning I had uploaded 7.36 time what I had downloaded. That’s what it took to get my overall ratio higher.
By the way, in BitTorrent terminology downloading is called “leeching” and uploading, or sharing with others is called “seeding.” That’s why it says “Seeding to 6 of 6 peers”. That means 6 people are currently getting parts of the file from me.