600+ kBps!

I downloaded OpenOffice.org 2.0 just now and I was shocked at the download speed. I downloaded through bittorrent and I was getting 600+ kilobytes per second. that's one advantage of going with an ISP that doesn't do bandwidth capping. I use destiny cable internet and while I've never before seen 600+ kBps, i regularly see 100-200 kBps.

I guess someone else in the destiny network was seeding the torrent. Or maybe there's just a whole lot of bandwidth available on monday morning and I got all the benefit of it.

I downloaded the SUSE 10 eval DVD ISO a week ago and that came down at around 60kBps on average. There's something to be said about downloading an ISO via the official torrent too. When SUSE 10 was very new I tried to download with the official torrent and that was so slow (2-3kilo*bits* per second) i decided to download it over the edonkey network instead. That download completed but the ISO was bad, so it was quite a waste of time. When i downloaded from the official torrent again, it slowly went up to around 60 kiloBytes per second. So official torrent+wait+a+few+days is the right thing to do I guess.

Possibly, too, downloading other (more popular)distributions would be better via the official torrents. I've done my bit at misinforming people about SUSE licensing (old information from when it was still SUSE and not novell). Probably people stay away from SUSE because they still have the impression (as I did, until I was gently corrected by a SUSE/novell representative) that SUSE is not yet freely distributable. Well, the eval edition *is* now freely distributable.

Anyway, I'm waiting for Mandriva 2006 to become available to see what the download rate on that will be :-). I'm the second worst type of ISP client, really, downloading things sometimes only to see what the ISP's performance is like. The worst type, of course, are those guys with huge hard disks who download movies, games and mp3s as if there were no tomorrow.

tiger