Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enormous datasets

Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by swiley on Monday August 29, 2016 @11:13AM (#12382365)

When I was younger I would only download these via bittorent because our connection was extremely unreliable and bittorent was always restartable.

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by rck404 on Monday August 29, 2016 @11:22AM (#12382439)

Even now I do the same. In india direct downloads are slightly slower. I guess it's to do with the mirror location or something else. Torrent makes it much faster

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by kochthesecond on Monday August 29, 2016 @12:26PM (#12383001)

Probably because tcp or http or both are throttled somewhere. Bit torrent uses any port and lots of connections so throttling is much less effective.

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by mads on Monday August 29, 2016 @07:43PM (#12386309)

Same in China. The Chinese firewall throttles TCP connections making direct downloads very slow. Not uncommon to have an unbearable slow connection while browsing web pages and then when starting a torrent download, you immediately get 2 Megabytes per second download speeds here.

A tip is to use a tool like axel (https://github.com/eribertomota/axel) to do direct downloads. This will usually speed it up.

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Re:Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enorm... by voltagex_ on Tuesday August 30, 2016 @02:36AM (#12387947)

>My name is Eriberto and I am not a C developer. I imported Axel from its old repository[1] to GitHub (the original homepage and developers are inactive)

Uh oh. Thanks to the repo owner for updating the README, but that's not a good situation.

I'd also like to suggest aria2c for this purpose: https://aria2.github.io/

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