Hector Martin

first-world problems: the *slowest* broadband plan I can get is 300 Mbps up 300 Mbps down. it's 50 USD/month without commitment. I don't even need that much! the fastest one I can get from the same ISP is 10 Gbps down 2.5 Gbps up, 345 USD/month.

I cannot possibly fathom what one could use 10 Gbps of bandwidth for. last time I downloaded a lot of torrents my drive array bottomed out at around 180 Mbps, bottlenecked by random I/O. you'd need striped RAID and a beefy CPU and I/O subsystem to handle even 1 Gbps

3-4Gbps is easy with standard RAID on SATA rust with sequential I/O. Torrents are more IOPS-heavy, but at that point you'd set it up to download to an SSD/NVMe and move to HDD when complete. 461MB/s off my RAID6 at home. I always peg GigE with NFS.

I had a rather unusual workload where I was downloading dozens of TB of torrents simultaneously (and it wasn't really worth going RAID or SSD anyway because hashing the blocks became the bottleneck slightly above random I/O being so)

Fair enough. Personally, I could totally use a 1Gbps pipe since I shuttle data to/from servers often enough (backups, etc), but with a 100mbps connection my bottleneck tends to be the backbone. International peering seems to be getting worse rather than better.

Doesn't help that thanks to Russia being in the middle of the right way around the globe, my data has to go the wrong way around all the time.

wait, what's the problem with IP transit through Russia

Do packets ever go through Russia? From Japan to Europe always seems to go through the US. If I VPN into Hong Kong I get a route via Singapore and France (mediterranean cable?), which makes sense... but the route from Japan to the HK VPN inexplicably bounces through the US first.