About Steam and how it works

[Dead-Inside]

I'm writing this because a lot of people seem to be confused

Some of you might know of bittorrent. It's a program that let's you share files with 1 or several base-servers and then people share their fragments with eachother which creates less bandwidth usage for the central server/s and makes for faster download times. (See this link)

Steam uses bittorrent. Valve hired the guy who created bittorrent (Bram Cohen) in either 2002 or 2003 (I'm not sure but it's been news on HL2.net before). Furthermore I seriously doubt they only have one server in their headquarters, seeing as how they spread programs all over the world, huge programs. So when you download something from steam you'll get massive speeds because everyone who's dling the same time you are also gives you parts that you don't have.

This means when HL2 is released you'll probably download at the maximum speed possible, because you can download from so many locations at the same time. This counts for *all* programs released through steam. Since there are so many users, there's almost always at least a couple of thousand people downloading at any one given time, even if there weren't you'd just download of their massive line from their servers.

Regards
Dead-Inside

(PS. If you'd like to add something, please reply and I'll edit DS.)

 

[kingthebadger]

everyone knows how steam works...

 

[Mr-Fusion]

EDIT
You're totally incorrect Dead-Inside.

 

[^Ben]

No the steam client itself does not use bittorrent.

Maybe the servers use some form of bittorrent.

Or maybe they don't use bittorrent atall. Maybe they hired him because he is obviously a good network protocol programmer.

Theres always one thing that niggles me about the creator of bittorrent working at valve. We all know that bittorrent has many legal uses but one of its main uses is to download illiegal software, and we all know that when HL2 goes the .GCF's are gonna be all over bittorrent very very quickly with probably a feck load of leechers. If i was Bram i would be super pissed off because that eats into valves profits and inturn if Bram gets royalties will eat into his royalites aswell.

 

[Dead-Inside]

What the...?

"You're totally incorrect Dead-Inside."

and

"No the steam client itself does not use bittorrent."

You get that from where?

 

[slicktick]

Valve uses content servers, people who use steam (such as myself) do not upload any information to other steam users. We download content directly from content servers.

 

[^Ben]

And you get youre information from where?

Do you realise how pissed of people would be if this was implemented.

They will have enough content servers the weeks before release to deal with the demand.

 

[craig]

Dead-Inside, you're way off.

Steam doesn't use our bandwidth to share files. They have their own servers to send information to us. Key players at Valve have even stated that they'll trickle data to use when major stuff is due for release (such as CSS & HL2), so that the servers aren't ground to a halt.

This isn't to say that Bram Cohen isn't implementing some features in Steam (which could be turned on by either nice Steam users, or people with too much bandwidth) to share files and inturn share the load.