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by bigmanwalter 2129 days ago
I can usually max out my connection speed with torrents. This is rarely the case with direct downloads.
3 comments

The start up time of a torrent is typically so long though, by the time it has connected to all peers and is downloading I have already downloaded the iso with a direct download anyway.
Soon, when QUIC is widely supported by the swarm (just needs updating to the current version), IPFS should be better than torrents for start-up delay, and much more importantly, it allows for sharing data across "torrents" when using content-defined chunking via rabin or buzhash. This means that things like common larger binaries get shared between images that include them, which should greatly increase the average amount of seeders for the chunks that make up an image.
There's a feature of linx-server that provides uploaded files with a torrent URL as well as a regular download URL. I believe the torrent client tries fetching data from peers as well as from linx (http).

https://github.com/andreimarcu/linx-server

On symmetric gigabit fiber only a few services, mainly steam and battle.net have ever given me 90mbyte/s download speeds. A surprising amount will limit to 500mbit or less, even if you have the download pipe for it.
Guess I just have slow internet :(