[anon_d]

I don't have a big-picture answer for you, but I'll point out that there are a lot of performance-relevant details that are different between the two protocols.

A torrent is basically a filesystem, dumped into a single large bytestring, broken into constant size chunks. Then there is a fairly small swarm of nodes trading those chunks. Most of those nodes are trying to download everything, and want to saturate inbound/outbound pipes.

- IPFS is a single massive DHT for advertising who has what for every single blob in the entire network. Most nodes have a tiny subset of that data.

- IPFS does not use a constant block size.

- IPFS uses a "multihash" instead of hard-coding a specific hash function. This adds parsing time to hashes, and means that hashes are not a consistent size, and they have sizes that don't fit cleanly into words.

Those are just some details that I happen to know off the top of my head, but you start to see the picture. In every architectural trade-off, IPFS goes for the more general thing, instead of the performant thing.