Why Do Torrents Do This?

[thechampishere]

Im downloading a DCP torrent for those of you who know what that is. Is very new so not that many seeders but i was wondering why does it jump to 112kbs for 5 mins than the next 20 it stays at 0kbs than 50kbs for 2 mins than jumps back down? Why does it do things like that? Does it depend on how many seeds there are?

[manker]

The torrent file is broken down into 'chunks'.

Some of the chunks will have more seeders than others, the chunks with the most seeders will elicit the highest download speeds. So when you're downloading a poorly seeded chunk, your download speed will probably be lower.

The less seeders there are, the more likely your download speed will deviate as it's doing now.

The way your client decides which chunk to download goes some way to explaining why some clients are faster than others.