Scott Burns wrote:
This strikes me as slightly loopy given http seems to be able to serve many files using just one open port...
Having one port per torrent means that your the Bittorrent application doesn't have to have any notion of interprocess communication. In other words, you can run two, three, etc. separate instances of Bittorrent that know nothing of each other's existence, and they can still function correctly.
If you wanted to serve all of your torrents off of the same port, you would need to have a "Bittorrent server" of sorts that knew about every torrent you wanted to share. In addition incoming clients would need to tell your system (the bt server) which torrent you wanted to download. It's definitely do-able, but probably a little less clean...and it's certainly not the way the author of BT chose to do it. And at this point making one "bittorrent server" serve up multiple torrents would mean a change in the Bittorrent API, which I don't think will happen.
Jeremy
