March 13, 2008 by sharky
To confirm our belief that bonafide torrents would be faster than decentrally-hosted Azureus magnet links, we decided to put them head-to-head in a speed test.
To achieve this, we downloaded four different torrents and the four corresponding ‘magnet links’. Since we couldn’t open both the torrent and magnet link in the same BitTorrent client (Azureus v2.5), we opened the torrents in µtorrent (v1.6.1).
The results really aren’t all that surprising. Nor should they be - Azureus magnet links are not designed to be the Porsches of BitTorrent. Their purpose is to potentially squeeze out those last few packets that otherwise wouldn’t be available from a seedless or dead torrent.
We chose four popular movie torrents for the experiment (”popular” meaning high seed/peer numbers). This would ensure that both clients would be able to maximize download speeds through a large swarm of users. Here’s the torrents we selected from mininova:
10,000 B C 2008 CAM XViD-prevail [btarena.org]
The Speed Test Results
Numbers are in KB/s. It appears that the .torrents took this race! However, Azureus did win on one account - for National Treasure. And in fact, we predicted it to be a little more lop-sided than what it was…proving that Azureus magnet links are a viable alternative to torrents.
| BitTorrent - (utorrent) | Azureus Magnet Link† | |
| 10,000 BC | 114.0 | 79.5 |
| National Treasure | 105.9 | 123.1 |
| Run Fat Boy Run | 89.5 | 84.3 |
| Southland Tales | 201.1 | 115.4 |
| AVERAGE SPEED | 127.63 KB/s | 100.6 KB/s |
†Azureus doesn’t show a statistic for the “average” download speed of completed torrents. Instead, it shows data for the “time” it took to complete a torrent, in hours and minutes. To calculate the average download rate, for example - ‘National Treasure’ is 707.34 MB with a “Finished in” time of 98m, we had to derive the KB of the file and divide it by seconds. 714.34 X 1024 = 724316 (total KB) divided by 98m (98 minutes X 60s) = 5886 seconds. Therefore the average download speed was 724316 / 5886 which equals 123 KB/s.
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