Bittorrent improvement or not

[quikimpulse]

I just registered today and the site recommended that i come here to download torrents. I am new to this torrent thing, but from what i am witnessing my computer takes longer using torrent than it would just downoading straight from the source. I am using dsl and it is taking me like over 5 hours to download a 170mb file. like the title says do u consider bittorrent an improvement from standard downloading protocol.

[_Sin_]

Originally Posted by quikimpulse

I just registered today and the site recommended that i come here to download torrents. I am new to this torrent thing, but from what i am witnessing my computer takes longer using torrent than it would just downoading straight from the source. I am using dsl and it is taking me like over 5 hours to download a 170mb file. like the title says do u consider bittorrent an improvement from standard downloading protocol.

It depends:

If your torrent swarm is "good" (lots of seeds, good upload capabilities) and you've configured your client properly, then BT is as good as HTTP in terms of speed. Also, the biggest advantage of BT is that recent files are available to nearly everyone as everybody can put up a torrent and share it. The BT system enables the only uploader to upload quite efficiently and is better than most (or even all) p2p programs.
Only disadvantage: Older torrents are less seeded thus decreasing the speed of the swarm greatly.

[NoSanninWa]

Originally Posted by quikimpulse

I just registered today and the site recommended that i come here to download torrents. I am new to this torrent thing, but from what i am witnessing my computer takes longer using torrent than it would just downoading straight from the source. I am using dsl and it is taking me like over 5 hours to download a 170mb file. like the title says do u consider bittorrent an improvement from standard downloading protocol.

Absolutely and absolutely not.

It is certainly not nearly as fast as speeds that I can get from an ftp site or a IRC bot. It isn't rare to get speeds of 200-400kB/s in that manner so BitTorrent is notably slower even if you get a good torrent swarm. It is extremely rare (but not completely unheard of) for me to get those kinds of download speeds with BT.

On the other hand, ftp sites have limited log ons and IRC bots have huge queues. So BitTorrent is notably superior in those respects. BitTorrent beats the heck out of any other download method in terms of reliability and ease of use.

Of course neither of those are really relevant to why we use BT for downloading anime. The reason that we use BT for anime releases is because it enables groups with very little money to make a fast release to thousands of interested downloaders with very little effort. In that respect BT is undeniably superior to anything else ever created.

[dreamless]

I think it depends a lot on your connection and location. For example I'm in Singapore and I can't get over 10K/s from some supposedly super fast ftp servers in China, nor can I get any good speed from some supposedly fast IRC servers in US. However for BT since you get peers from all over the world you are more likely to get some fast connections from someone somewhere.

Also the speed of BT download depends a lot on the swarm. I've seen some people getting over 1MB/s speed with BT. Remember that for BT downloads the more people downloading the faster it is, unlike ftp or irc where it's faster when there's less people downloading. For my 512K ADSL connection, most of the time I can only get like 5K/s to 15K/s from most ftp servers and irc bots, however I can usually get 50K-60K/s with BT.

So the answer is it depends on your particular connection and situation I guess...