Firefox download manager faster than KTorrent??

[carr]

Friend of mine without broadband asked me to download the latest stable release of Mandriva. I started the download with KTorrent and after about 45 minutes came back to check progress and found that the ETA had gone up to around 10 hours for a 4.3 odd GB .iso. Wow thats a long time., I checked network utilization using the graph is System Monitor and we were running around 80 KB/sec. Paused KTorrent and opened Firefox, telling it to download the .iso from the ,edu site. I was very surprised when network utilization went to around 1000 kb/sec and the time to finish was much less (according to the Firefox download manager I have 13% of the file on hand and time to go is 1 hr 11 minutes). I had always been under the impression that any torrent client would be a lot faster than a straight download.......

The ISP here is Comcast. We pay for 6 mb down and around 2 up and routinely get it. The machine is a core quad with 2 GB of RAM. OS is OpenSuse 11.2-64 bit.

So what gives here. Is the torrent site that much slower than a straight download?? Or or could it be something the ISP is doing with torrent activity?? I dont know enough about network protocol to know but I found the time difference and the amount of network utilization very surprising. Thoughts??

Carr

[gogalthorp]

Torrents come from many sources ie all the others that are downloading. It is not the same at all as a straight download. That said it might be that you just did not have very many sharing. or maybe you were not sharing and thus were being snubbed. Or maybe your ISP is throttling the traffic.

[linxt]

Next time you try to use ktorrent, look at the seeders. That is the number of comouters that have the program you want and are willing to share it. The leachers are the people who are trying to get portions of the program from you.

Be aware that when a program first becomes available, there will be relatively few seeders from which to download. Don't think that would be the case for Mandriva though.

[gogalthorp]

With Comcast I suspect maybe throttling.

[carr]

Many thanks to all of you-- I did have both upload and download speeds set to unlimited.....additionally I had it looked like, a ton of seeders......

Which leaves throttling. Interesting (and again I dont know enough about it) that Comcast can tell that you are using a torrent client and would throttle that where they might not a direct download. Ah well. Interesting in that in this same day I discovered that we have bandwidth caps on a monthly basis.....where I thought we bought the service regulated by the actual speed rather than an y monthly usage cap -- ours is 250 GB.month. No way that I would ever use that much---

Anyway, many thanks for the info.

Regards
Carr

[linuxforever]

Torrents are always slow to very slow, for reasons mentioned here.
So you better never use them.

If you "normally" download from web sites you too won't reach your max download speed.
It should be from 80 t0 90 % of you speed, normally.
But at times it can be less than that.
It is true that some ISP providers throttle their customers.
That is when they have too many customers for the bandwith they have available.
Often it depends on the time of the day.
It is not that they want to do it, but they have no other option.

So you better download from web sites.
Or still beter, use ftp sites, if they are available.
Use a good ftp-client program, and you should go faster than from a web site.
But even then it depends if the ftp servers are not overloaded.
Things that might happen if a new suse version is available.
On the other hand, servers are available all over the world.

[reed9]

So you better never use them.

Well, if there isn't some massive rush to get the iso, it save the project or mirror some bandwidth is you use a torrent instead. And they aren't always slowto very slow. I've had linux torrents download as fast or or faster than a direct download plenty of times.

[oz]

Which leaves throttling. Interesting (and again I dont know enough about it) that Comcast can tell that you are using a torrent client and would throttle that where they might not a direct download.

Here's an article that you can read regarding their throttling implementation:

New Comcast Throttling System 100% Online

I rarely do any torrents but when I have done them, they've always started out terribly slow then would pick up a great deal of speed later on in the process.

[natesh]

Friend of mine without broadband asked me to download the latest stable release of Mandriva. I started the download with KTorrent and after about 45 minutes came back to check progress and found that the ETA had gone up to around 10 hours for a 4.3 odd GB .iso. Wow thats a long time., I checked network utilization using the graph is System Monitor and we were running around 80 KB/sec. Paused KTorrent and opened Firefox, telling it to download the .iso from the ,edu site. I was very surprised when network utilization went to around 1000 kb/sec and the time to finish was much less (according to the Firefox download manager I have 13% of the file on hand and time to go is 1 hr 11 minutes). I had always been under the impression that any torrent client would be a lot faster than a straight download.......

The ISP here is Comcast. We pay for 6 mb down and around 2 up and routinely get it. The machine is a core quad with 2 GB of RAM. OS is OpenSuse 11.2-64 bit.

So what gives here. Is the torrent site that much slower than a straight download?? Or or could it be something the ISP is doing with torrent activity?? I dont know enough about network protocol to know but I found the time difference and the amount of network utilization very surprising. Thoughts??

Carr

check out Ctorrent...one of the best torrent client