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When I was younger I would only download these via bittorent because our connection was extremely unreliable and bittorent was always restartable.

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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

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.

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.

>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/

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