What is seeds and leeches

News and Special Offers occasional. Techopedia Explains Seed. What Does Seed Mean? A leech, on the other hand, is a BitTorrent user who downloads the files shared by the seeds and does not seed back to other users.

The download time for a file shared via BitTorrent depends on the number of seeders available for that file; more seeders mean higher torrent speed. Techopedia Explains Seed In addition to seeders and leechers, there are peers who are users downloading a file, have part of it, yet are simultaneously uploading the downloaded part to other users. Even though the peers share back the files simultaneously, the actual torrent speed mainly depends on the number of seeders available for the shared file.

For example, assume that a seed is seeding a file at 50 kbps, and there are five leechers to download that file. Initially, the file is shared at 10 kbps each for every leech. When the leechers finish downloading, and if they seed back the file at the same speed of 50 kbps, the total torrent speed increases to kbps.

This process continues depending on the number of seeders and leechers for that specific file. A user who wants to upload a file first creates a small torrent descriptor file that they distribute by conventional means web, email, etc. They then make the file itself available through a BitTorrent node acting as a seed. When a file is completely downloaded by a peer, it becomes an additional seed.

Source: Wikipedia. Technology News Security news Gadgets Guide. Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Privacy Policy. Different file types have different sites or networks for handling them. The files with large data size are usually handled by torrents. Along with torrent, comes the words Seeds and leechers. The difference between Seed and Leecher is that seed downloads the complete files and also leaves their torrent links open for others to download from whereas leechers are the ones who download or are downloading the files from the torrent links given by the seeders.

Seeds have the downloaded file and leave the link for the files to be downloaded from. Seeds increases download speed but can cause a decrease in upload speed. A single torrent file can have multiple seeds. True to the words, leechers are the ones who download the file from the links given by the seeds or seeders.

Once a leecher has completed the download, they become seeds as they do not affect the bandwidth anymore. Seeds are the clients in the form of computer systems or people who give links for downloading the files that they have already downloaded. This means that they give links from which others can download their files.

The computer or people themselves are called seeders. Seeds increase the download and upload speed of files. One file can have more than one seeders.