On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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 case…
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