When I was younger I would only download these via bittorent because our connect...

rck404 · on Aug 29, 2016

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

kochthesecond · on Aug 29, 2016

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.

UndefinedRef · on Aug 29, 2016

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.

voltagex_ · on Aug 30, 2016

>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/