DHT, What is it, Why is it?

[Warp]

Hi, this is my first topic to start, hopefully its not a topic thats been discussed to death, i tried searching, for a little while, but with a forum so big, one can get fed up.

Either way, my knowledge is that DHT is used for public torrents more than private trackers...and thats about all i know.

Currently I can only use public trackers, (thats why i joined this forum).

So, basically other than wanting to know what DHT does for me, I would also like to know, if and when I get invited to a private torrent site, should I turn it off?

[limbeck6]

As far as I know you can't enable DHT on any torrent that comes from a private tracker.
I think thats one of the reasons BitComit was banned by most/all private trackers

[Warp]

THanks for the quick repsonse limbeck, and yes i think you theory is correct, I jsut sigend up for supreme torrents, and with DHT enabled i was getting nothing. Luckily, i use utorrent and disabled it, and am now downloading away!

[ghurka]

There should be no need to turn off DHT within uTorrent. The private flag on the tracker overrides this anyway so you will not upload to anyone outside that private community.

DHT is also there in case the private tracker is down. It will ensure you remain connected to the seeds/peers.

I have no problems with DHT enabled.

[j0hn]

indeed
theres no need to disable dht on good clients
the private tracker flag stop dht working on those particular torrent files

[Warp]

i see, maybe i wasnt waiting long enough, or something.

[Skiz]

This definitely hasn't been discussed to death b/c I've never even heard of it.

What the deuce is DHT? :blink:

[Rip The Jacker]

DHT allows people share the files in the torrent without a tracker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcomet#BitComet_DHT_Issues

Wikipedia rocks!