Is Bit Torrent supposed to be quicker than a direct download?

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, James McDonald wrote:
> OK so I went to Openoffice to download version 2.2.1 and thought I would
> try the bit torrent download.
>
> It seemed to be steady at 24KB/s a second. So I canned it and went to
> the normal download link. Which is currently running at 160KB/s.
>
> What is the advantage to bittorrent?

Bittorrent is only faster when there are alot of people seeding (dozens, 
if not hundreds), and the filesize is large.  I've been on many torrents 
that have completely saturated my downstream bandwidth (about 3Mb/s), 
however none of them have been OSS torrents.  In fact some of the slowest 
torrents i've ever joined have been for distro ISO images.  I'm not quite 
sure why, other than having relatively small numbers of seeders

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org