General Question

elbanditoroso's avatar

What takes more total elapsed time? Torrenting sequentially or torrenting simultaneously?

Asked by elbanditoroso (33594points) August 2nd, 2018

For the sake of this question, let’s say that I have five torrents that I want to download. Each of them is 500 megabytes.

Also for the sake of this question, let’s assume that my cable modem connection is 120 M down (up isn’t really relevant). I am not limiting bandwidth. I am using a VPN, but that doesn’t seem to make an appreciable dent in download speed.

uTorrent seems to split the allotted bandwidth by the number of simultaneous torrents. Meaning that while I can have several running at the same time, each will get a smaller percentage of the total bandwidth.

The question:

I want to download these files as quickly as possible.

Will the total (gross) time elapsed be greater if I do each file individually (and get full bandwidth for each download), or will it be greater if I do all five simultaneously?

[My gut feel is that sequentially will take longer, but not by much.]

Ideas?

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2 Answers

ragingloli's avatar

Theoretically, it should not make a difference.
But practically, assuming sequential downloading, the torrents may not all download at full speed, due to seed and peer differences between them, so downloading simultaneously should be faster.

ragingloli (52291points)“Great Answer” (3points) Flag as…
johnpowell's avatar

There is a fair amount of overhead when downloading since you are grabbing random chunks from random seeds. So you will probably be better of just doing one at a time.

But the difference would be negligible in the real world.

There could be I/O issues. Not really a concern with 5X500MB. But could be if there was much more and it is uploading too.

johnpowell (17881points)“Great Answer” (2points) Flag as…

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