mtntravler, you're right about partial sharing: it is indeed a very good thing.

Like Bittorrent, Partial File Sharing allows many hosts to share the pieces they already have even before they have the complete file, and thus take the load off the original supplier.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into making PFS and the "download mesh" work well so that large files especially can get distributed quickly.

At one time there were corruption issues, but then the developers and opensource coders implemented THEX, which allowed the verification of even very small chunks of the file. If you watch your uploads in the monitor pane, you'll often see early in the upload "uploading hash tree" (THEX). PFS at work


In short, PFS is a key reason many downloads can complete so quickly.