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P2P Basics

 

P2P file sharing accounts for more traffic than any other application, including the Web, on the Internet

P2P file sharing, which includes MP3s, videos, software, documents, and images, can be considered the most important Internet application

In a P2P file sharing system, an ordinary computer user connects to another ordinary computer user, called a peer, through the use of a P2P file sharing software and a direct TCP connection

If the connection is lost during a file transfer, the software may attempt to connect to another peer that has the same program

While you are downloading a file, another peer may be downloading a file from your computer

Every participating peer is both a consumer and distributor of content

Because all content is transferred directly between ordinary peers without passing through third-party servers, P2pfile sharing can take advantage of the resources (bandwidth, storage, and CPU) in a large collection of peers -- in other words, P2P file sharing is highly scalable

Though no third-party server is involved, P2P still relies on the client-server relationship - the file is sent from the server peer to the client peer with a file-transfer protocol, and as such all peers must be able to run both sides of the file-transfer protocol (normally HTTP)

A peer acts as both a Web client and a transient Web server; a server because it is serving content within HTTP responses, and transient because it is only intermittenly connected to the Internet and may get a new IP address each time it reconnects to the Internet