On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Torrent isn't a very good transfer method for
things which are not
fairly popular as it has a fair amount of overhead.
The wikimedia download site should be able to saturate your internet
connection in any caseā¦
But some ISP's throttle TCP-connections (either by design or by simple
oversubscription and random packet drops), so many small connections *can*
yield a better result for the end user. And if you are so unlucky as to
having a crappy connection from your country to the download-site, maybe,
just maybe someone in your own country already has downloaded it and is
willing to share the torrent... :)
I can saturate my little 1M ADSL-link with torrent-downloads, but forget
about getting throughput when it comes to HTTP-requests... if it's in the
country, in close proximity and the server is willing, then *maybe*.. but
else.. no way.
Not everyone is very well connected, unfortunately...
/Stigmj