bittorrent dl - still slow, does it pick up?

[Jim Cornette]

billg wrote:
> I've never been especially impressed with torrent. It's never offered me
> much improvement over ftp.
> 
> I pointed torrent at the Duke server this morning.  The download of all 4
> iso's concluded about 30 minutes ago. That's approx. 8 hours of download
> time (obviously, the projected download times reported by torrent are not
> to be believed). Top speed was around 150 kb/s, but the rate varied a
> lot, with frequent drops as low as 6 and 7 kb/s.  Upload speed seemed to
> remain constant in the mid 20's.
> 
> I tried torrent yesterday, letting it run for a few hours before giving
> up.  Speeds were always below 10 kb/s.
> 
> Dunno if it makes much difference to torrent, but I'm within shouting
> distance of Duke and RedHat.  If they were handing out actual CD's, I
> could have made 4 or 5 round trips while waiting for the download to
> finish. :-)

I started the download via the Duke torrent about noon yesterday. I had 
the GUI up all the time and had a kernel panic when I came home at 5PM.

I started the torrent from Duke again in a terminal and it finished 
downloading at about 3:30ish this morning. During the time between 5 PM 
and 11:30 PM the top speeds were around 50 kb/s and the upload speed was 
staying around 40 kb/s.

I liked the fact that clicking on the torrent link downloaded the 4 cd 
images, the MD5SUM and the rescue CD image. It put the files in a 
directory and was pretty automatic.

I have to agree that I had better luck with ftp retrieval of the images 
though.

Jim