The real I2P speed story
There has always been this document, which
now is partially outdated and misleading.
Anybody who wants to upload/download stuff faster using I2P should
consider the facts given here.
Basically for any data transfer your local application uses
tunnels to remote peers. Two parallel connections to the same peer
will use the same tunnel, share the bandwidth and slow down
transfers by a factor of two. This is why it is a bad idea to post
multiple similar torrents at the same time. They will attract the
same set of leechers with all tunnels shared between all torrents.
Some applications like MuWire also load tremendous amounts of
overhead onto their tunnels (currently 1 GB in/out per day for an
idle instance).
So users requested applications to use multiple tunnels, in order
to at least get unused tunnels for additional connections. First
the devs increased the max number of tunnels, only to drop back to
use them "as needed". Background for this is that I2P selects
random tunnels for new connections instead of unused ones. This is
why high tunnel quantities were demanded just to increase the
probability of getting unused tunnels. I2Speed corrects this,
handing out fresh tunnels when possible and distributing
connections evenly over tunnels. Although tunnels are expensive to
build, today there are lots of unused ones on the live net, just
because they were configured, but not randomly selected.
Furthermore, tunnels are built using a set of known fast peers,
for which I2Speed raises the limit from 50 to 100, but actually
the peers qualified as fast always range in the 50 area. If you
build lots of tunnels, they will all share those fast peers that
in turn will probably be selected too by other I2P users. Running
two or more I2p routers in parallel, distributing your local
tunnels, will definitely help a bit.
On the lowest level then there is the actual transmission over the
wire. Here I2Speed allows much faster transfer speeds especially
when using UDP, but you still depend on the speed of the other
hops in your tunnels.
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