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What is Swarm Merging?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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It's a way to share files across seeders/peers of different torrents, as long as the torrents contain at least one identical file. For example, let's say that:
Without swarm merging, you're stuck waiting for new seeders or peers from torrent1 that have the file B. With swarm merging, your torrent program will get the file B from people sharing torrent2 too.
I recall this feature from Vuze; but apparently BiglyBT also uses it.
BitTorrent v2 allows this also. In v1, torrents with multiple files are hashed continuously (cat) together without respect to file boundaries. A side effect of this that many people notice is that to grab a specific file may require downloading some of the files before or after the one you want.
Under v2, each file is hashed separately, so this fixes the aforementioned problem and should allow sharing of files across torrent files.
That's good to know!
You can extract, calculate and compare those hashes using this tool.
In the next bug-fix release of libtorrent the tool will have ability to generate magnet links to download torrents without duplicate files, saving storage, bandwidth and most importantly time.
Very useful for dumps, libraries, video/photo archives ;)