Does region affect download speeds on IRC?
reddit / irc

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mechanism08 · 2021-05-17 17:19

I'm a total beginner with IRC and I recently found out you can
download all sorts of stuff through the IRC.

I asked on discord why I was getting slow speeds (200KB/s) despite
having a relatively fast internet (3MB/s). One person said that it was
because the bot I'm getting the file from is located in EU while I am
located at Asia.

Does region really affect download speeds?

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jimb0z_ · 2021-05-17 17:47

There is no central server involved in a dcc session. It’s completely
P2P so quality of the connection has a higher level of variance based
on several different variables. Physical distance (region) is
definitely one of them

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fps81 · 2021-05-18 00:06

You can only download stuff “from IRC” if you initiate a direct client
to client (DCC) transfer. In that case, you’re getting the file
directly from another user’s internet connection, which might not be
properly set up for sending large uploads.  Sometimes the connections
between two users on IRC are slow due to routing issues.  So, yes,
region matters.

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kellyzdude · 2021-05-18 01:23

DCC on IRC uses TCP connections, which have some interesting
constraints over distance. The round-trip time will factor into how
much data is sent, as TCP will send a chunk of data, and then wait for
an acknowledgement that it was received before sending the next chunk.
Sometimes these parameters are tunable, but it tends to matter more on
the sender's side than yours receiving, and each tune for performance
under ideal conditions will cause bigger problems under less-than-
ideal circumstances.

Your total throughput will decrease over distance regardless of your
potential capacity as a result - 3MB/s may be feasible within a few
hundred miles and a few ms of latency, but as your latency to the
origin increases, so too will your highest speeds drop. This is partly
why some protocols favor sourcing from multiple locations at once, a
la BitTorrent, and why others favor using UDP and adding their own
error correction on top.

And that latency is just one factor. You'll also be limited by any
routing that might be going on over heavily loaded or speed limited
connections, any inefficient routes that unnecessarily increase the
latency, as well as bottlenecked connections at either end (you might
not be using all of your 3mbit line, but that's not to say that the
bot's connection isn't maxed, or limiting its bandwidth per-stream in
order to prevent maxing).

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ellenor2000 · 2021-05-19 14:03

You mean from DCC? Yes, distance between yourself and the place where
the DCC is operated from is important.